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Cenacle - In hidden crypts and dark vaults, cenacles of secret religion meet to keep their flame alive.

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Cenacle - October 2006

The Master by Colm Toibin

October 31st 2006 08:58

I went to this book with every kind of malevolence--Henry James is not somebody I admire and it was shortlisted for the Booker prize. Years ago, when I was a kid I persuaded a friend that buying Ben Okri’s The Famished Road would be a good thing because it won the Booker prize. I have never been able to live down the disgrace. So, when Colm Toibin came up with the obsequiously titled The Master, I was not enthused. It came in “a James season” along with Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, which eventually won the Man-Booker( probably for its satire on Lady Thatcher than for any of its literary merits). I did try reading The Line of Beauty and put it away after a few pages which did not help matters at all.

The Master by Colm Toibin

But now that I have read it, I am glad I did. It is clear that Toibin admires Henry James, but he is clearly not beholden to him. It tracks the moods of James after his play Guy Domville had become a resounding failure and shuttles in time to illuminate James's important creations as he struggles to spring back from the failure.

Toibin tries to emulate the same sensitivity that is the hallmark of James but without James’s predilection for dubious prose and excess of feeling. The narrative is smoothly controlled and the writing perpicacious.

In many ways, this novel is like The Master of Petersburg of J.M.Coetzee, which followed Dostoevysky as he is preparing to write The Possessed. That novel is one of my all time favourites and I found Coetzee’s Dostoevsyky bland, not the blazing prophet of The Possessed whom I cherished. I don’t know if the portrait is faithful to James because I do not care for him. Probably this helped. Probably that’s why I found the portrait of an author who battles inner demons to produce a work of art, engaging and interesting.

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The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers

October 30th 2006 05:22

The Drawing of the Dark by Tim Powers

The siege of Vienna is regularly described as the most significant event in the conflict of Europe against the Ottoman Turks. The war continued for another 16 years but the decisive blow was struck here. When the Turkish army failed here, it marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman Empire.

In less academic circles, this event was also romanticised as the turning point in history where the West was able to repel the advance of the East. In more modern times, the clash of civilzations debate has all but colored this event with a backward nostalgia, the kind of victory that has to be repeated when the West feels itself to be under siege once again.

Tim Powers' novel The Drawing of the Dark was written much before any of these debates became urgent matters of the day. It was one his early novels, written before The Anubis Gates, the novel which established him as a leading a voice in science fiction fantasy. Brian Duffy is a middle-aged Irish mercenary, whiling his time away in Vienna. One day he gets entangled in a fight with three aristocratic youths. Wishing to leave the city to avoid any further trouble he jumps at the chance from an enigmatic Aurelianus who offers him the job as a bouncer in a beer club at Vienna. His voyage to Vienna is more eventful than he wished for, filled with parties Bacchic parties and a parade with mythic creatures.

When Brian reaches Vienna, these supernatural encounters become more common. Just as Vienna is the focus of struggle between Turkish armies and the West, there is a spiritual battle going on between Ibrahim, the chief magician of the Orient and Aurelianus. Brian slowly realises that he has to play a more decisive role in this portentous battle.

The novel is basically written in a tongue-in-cheek manner that besets science fiction before nineties. Imagine Irish mercenary called Brian Duffy in the middle of the Viennese siege! Nevertheless, Powers is a master of plotting and his no nonsense, vivid desrciptive style is breath-taking. The moonlit parade of Brian, for instance, is an amazing sequence.

When it was written, this book I am sure could have been read innocuously. With our present climate, it is hard to read it innocently like that. But, for all the unease you might feel, it is undeniable that there is a confrontation, if not an outright clash between East and West and this fantasy written more than 25 years ago, has acquired a sense of uneasy poignancy for our times.

Not to mention the fact that Powers is a great habit to cultivate. To imagine he wrote this book when he was just 25 years old!

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Romance, Porn and Politics

October 28th 2006 09:44

Hey, it's US election season and the capaign season is in high gear. First, George Allen of Virginia, is accused of racism because he called somebody macacca. Allen then retaliated by saying that his opponent wrote graphic scenes in his novels which described digustingly lurid sex acts and therefore, is not to be trusted with a US senate seat. The Democratic Party in turn dug up novels of no less than Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice-President. Apparently, she wrote in lesbian scenes in her novel Sisters too. Never knew that US political class was brimming with so many literary figures.

Lynne Cheney has a standout interview with Wolf Blitzer with CNN which is so enjoyable, it is unreal. She was there for talking about her latest children's book and she was taken "around a mighty long trip around a merry-go-around." Just notice how after their high-strung argument, they decide to leave the guns outside like sheriffs in old cowboy movies, talk about the children's book, and then complement each other, he on her preparedness for answering his questions and she on his not fair but tough questions. It spins and rolls itself like a postmodern dream of an interview.

That was not all. This time a Democrat cadidate running for a state comptroller race, refered to the unsuitability of his opponent's porn writings. Apparently, she was a romance writer in her younger days and filled her novels with great passages of steamy sex. The Democrat then posted the offending passages on his website provoking a huge backlash, from romance writers! Who knew there were so many romance writers in the world and they were organized. Apparently, even the usually Democrat voting romance writers are not voting for the democrat can. Read this from Houston Chronicle:

Dismiss romance writers as the drama queens of the supermarket set, perhaps, but call them pornographers at your own peril.

Just ask Fred Head.

Head, the Democratic long shot in this year's state comptroller race, is reaping the wrath of Texas romance writers for calling Republican rival Susan Combs a "pornographic book writer."

Since the Texas Democratic Convention in June, Head has repeatedly attacked a steamy romance novel Combs published in 1990, and even features excerpts from it on his campaign Web site. Head says it was hypocritical of her to write such a book and then support abstinence education as a Republican politician.

Once word of Head's attacks hit the romance trade press, cyberspace buzzed with the news.

"Out of the blue I had e-mails from England, Canada, California, all over Texas," said Combs, Texas agriculture commissioner and author of the 1990 romance, A Perfect Match. "Women all across the United States and foreign countries are very angry at what they see as an attack on women."

Combs launched a $3.2 million political advertising blitz Tuesday. The TV spots, which end with the words "experience we need, values we trust," stress Combs' roles as a small-business owner, former state legislator, agriculture commissioner, wife and mother.

Head, with $0 in campaign money, remained defiant, repeatedly calling Combs' book pornographic.

"I think the romance novelists should endorse my opponent," he said in response to their criticism of him. "That could probably get me elected. I just don't agree with writing what I believe is pornographic and not good for the young people."

Outraged romance writers first flooded Head's campaign in-box with angry e-mail.

This week, they vowed revenge at the ballot box.

"I told him I was a Texan, a Christian, a voter, a grandmother and I have written 46 novels," said Houston romance writer Patricia Kay. "I said, 'You are not going to get my vote.'

"The truth is," added Kay, 69, "I probably would have voted for him because I'm a registered Democrat."

Head could pay a big price for offending aficionados of romance fiction, the writers said, noting Romance Writers of America is headquartered in the Houston suburb of Spring and boasts more than 9,000 members. With $1.2 billion annually in sales, romance fiction makes up more than half of all popular mass-market fiction sold and 39 percent of all fiction, the association boasts.

"This has been a huge issue in the romance community. It's been a huge topic of conversation," said romance novelist Shana Galen of Houston.

"Are Romance Novels Porn?" she asked recently on blog www.jauntyquills.com. "Is a written depiction of two adults falling in love and expressing that love physically pornographic? I have always felt that my books promoted conservative, family values like love, fidelity and marriage."

A Perfect Match tells the tale of Emily Brown, a "cryptanalyst" for the National Security Agency. She meets her match in Ross Harding, a superspy.

"Their mouths had fused hotly, desperately, a feverish urgency in his touch," reads one passage in the book.

Galen wonders why Head posted excerpts from Combs' novel on his Web site if he views the writing as pornography young people shouldn't see.

"I just thought it was about the lowest blow he could make. It seems like a desperate attempt to knock Susan Combs down," said Julia London, an Austin author of 17 romance novels.

"I don't equate sex with bodice-ripping," she added. "A lot of women like to read about sex. It's part of the romance fantasy. Everyone likes to be in that feeling of falling in love. The initial thrill is always fun to read about."

Combs said she wrote her book during her 31-year marriage, and her husband jokes that the hero is modeled after him. "I think Fred Head is a very strange man, and I'm very concerned that anybody would believe anything he says," Combs said.

"We love romance, and women like happy and positive endings," she added. "I guess Mr. Head doesn't."

Both the links are courtesy Wizbang.

This gets better and better. Remember, the disgusting sexual act that I talked about in the first paragraph in the novel?It involves a father lifting a four year old child and performing fellatio on him. Ugh. Apparently, this is not something Webb has dreamed up. It's a strange custom in Cambodia!

This item from Cnsnews.com :

In an interview on Washington Post Radio Friday morning, Jim Webb, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Virginia, said excerpts of his novels are "a little bit inappropriate" to be read on news radio.

"I don't know why you're reading that on WTOP," Webb told host Mark Plotkin. "I think it's a little bit inappropriate."

Plotkin was reading an excerpt from Webb's novel "Something to Die For," in which Webb describes a female stripper performing sexual acts with a banana.

"I don't think that's appropriate for you to read on WTOP," Webb said again as Plotkin finished the excerpt. (Washington Post Radio is WTOP's sister station.)

The campaign of Republican Sen. George Allen on Thursday released excerpts from some of the war novels Webb wrote between 1978 and 2002. The books include some graphic sexual passages, as well as frequent uses of a racial slur for blacks and descriptions of Vietnamese women as "monkey-faced."

Among the excerpts is a scene from the 2002 novel "Lost Soldiers," in which a man embraces his four-year-old son and places the boy's penis in his mouth.

Webb said the release of the excerpts was "a Karl Rove campaign tactic" and a "classic example of the way this campaign has worked. It's smear after smear."

He defended his fiction as "illuminative."

"It's not a sexual act," Webb told Plotkin regarding the "Lost Soldiers" excerpt. "I actually saw this happen in a slum in Bangkok when I was there as a journalist."

"The duty of a writer is to illuminate the surroundings," he added.

Coincidentally, a Cambodian woman in Las Vegas is facing sexual assault charges for performing a similar act on her young son, according to an Oct. 14 report in the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

The article quotes an office manager for the Cambodian Association of America, who described the act as a sign of respect or love.

"It's an exception," Thira Srey told the Review-Journal of the practice. According to the report, the act is usually performed by a mother or caretaker on a child who is one year old or younger. In Webb's novel, the child is four years old.

Can it get any more sublime?

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Do young men like sex/relationship with older women?

October 27th 2006 05:57

MATURE CONTENT

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The Population Problem in the Ancient World and Today

October 26th 2006 09:16

Before quoting you a text from Mahabharatha, I would like to give you some context. According to the traditional Hindu mythology, there are four yugas or ages and Mahabharatha is set in the third yuga called Krita. The follwoing passage describes the onset of the Krita yuga:

And, O bull of the Bharata race, when such was the blessed state of the terrestrial world, the Asuras, O lord of men, began to be born in kingly lines. And the sons of Diti (Daityas) being repeatedly defeated in war by the sons of Aditi (celestials) and deprived also of sovereignty and heaven, began to be incarnated on the earth. And, O king, the Asuras being possessed of great powers, and desirous of sovereignty began to be born on earth amongst various creatures, such as kine, horses, asses, camels, buffaloes, among creatures such as Rakshasas and others, and among elephants and deer. And, O protector of the earth, owing to those already born and to those that were being born, the earth became incapable of supporting herself. And amongst the sons of Diti and of Danu, cast out of heaven, some were born on the earth as kings of great pride and insolence. Possessed of great energy, they covered the earth in various shapes. Capable of oppressing all foes, they filled the earth having the ocean for its boundaries. And by their strength they began to oppress Brahmanas and Kshatriyas and Vaisyas and Sudras and all other creatures also. Terrifying and killing all creatures, they traversed the earth, O king, in bands of hundreds and thousands. Devoid of truth and virtue, proud of their strength, and intoxicated with (the wine of) insolence, they even insulted the great Rishis in their hermitages.

And the earth, thus oppressed by the mighty Asuras endued with great strength and energy and possessed of abundant means, began to think of waiting on Brahman. The united strength of the creatures (such as Sesha, the Tortoise, and the huge Elephant), and of many Seshas too, became capable of supporting the earth with her mountains, burdened as she was with the weight of the Danavas. And then, O king, the earth, oppressed with weight and afflicted with fear, sought the protection of the Grandsire of all creatures.

Most religious mythologies have this division of time into various ages. It is reflection of time when there was no bronze and there was no iron. The Iron Age in many is particularly evil. What is interesting for us today is that the passage of one age into another should be greeted with fear. At the start of Krita age, the earth was burdened. This is a standard term for overpopulation. Remember, when this epic was written there was very little civilisation. Cultivable land was very hard to salavage; forests had to be cleared, rivers had to be drained and if these events were bonze age or pre-bronze age, it would have been even worse. What I am saying is that a large part of the known world was simply inhabitable to man. The land where man could flourish was very small and this could be seized by strangers.

We do not know who exactly Asuras were. There is more than a likely chance that the term refered to a real people who were later metastatized to a myth. But, whoever they were they were overbreeding and a hero was required to set the record straight.

This fear of overbreeding of the enemy is palpable in many other epics and other religions too. It is also curiously a big issue of our time. It is palpable, for instance, in increasingly gloomy predictions of Europe and the rise of Eurabia; in the dying out of the West in general and the rise of Asia; in the ageing of Industrial world in general; I think it also lies at the heart of much of animosity toward Islamic world.

And this is not the exclusive preserve of religion. Last week, America surpassed its 300 million mark and many on the Left were openly aghast that such a thing has come to happen. Not to mention the environamentalists for whom the very advancement of human population is an anathema. I am not condemning this attitude; the fears maybe genuine.Since I have been writing on how similar modern world is to the ancient and how some of man's concerns have never changed, it is only apt to point out this fear. Looks like we haven't come far from the Stone Age.

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In Search of Trojan War by Michael Wood

October 25th 2006 11:45

In Search of Trojan War by Michael Wood

There was a time when everybody thought that Iliad and Trojan War were merely stuff of legends and myth. But a man called Arthur Schliemann thought otherwise. And after a passionate search, he found Troy. Or so he thought. At least he found something.

Michael Wood’s book In Search of Trojan War details the extensive archeological journey to find evidence of Trojan War. The book details the baby steps that were taken before Schliemann blazed the trail, the sensationally romantic discoveries of Schliemann, and Sir Arthur Evans finding Mycenaean civilization and the discovery of Hittite city Hattusa.

Michael Wood

Wood is scrupulous observer and this book can be read as a serviceable history. But what nearly unravels Wood’s efforts is his excessive skepticism and a touch of elitism. He does not want to believe that Homer’s story could be based on a true fact even though all the evidence leads to that conclusion.

The reason behind that scepticism is not hard to find. For the past two hundred years there has beena constant battle against classicism and Homer has always been at the centre of that battle. For some reason, modern scholars are comfortable with the imperialistic sagas of Virgil, the religious aplocaypse of Dante but Homer bugs them. Probably no other author in history has been subjected as much "analysis" as Homer has been. It's no wonder then that the nineeeth-centuy prediliction of proving that Homer wasn't a single person morphed into twentieth-century obsession to prove that Homer's story is not true. To be fair, Wood at least provides the available evidence including the circumstantial one, unfazedly.

This photo of Henrietta Schliemann wearing "jewels of Helen

As for elitism, Arthur Schliemann has always been treated with a touch of scorn by the cognoscenti. Schlieman himself was a self-taught, self-made businessman who loved ancient Greece so much that he used later part of his life for a dramatic search of Greek civilization. His methods were raw, his claims certainly flamboyant for professorial types but it is undeniable that he made archaology what it is today. It is not for nothing that he is called Father of Archeaology. But, the scholarly types have not let go of their scorn and it is evident in Wood's treatment of Schliemann, though here too Wood tries hard to give Schliemann his due. But there's that snootiness.

If you want to capture the amazing romantic feeling surrounding the discovery of Troy, Mycenae and Hattusa, this is not the book for you. But, for all its flaws, it still makes for a compelling read.

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The Oracle by Valerio Manfredi

October 24th 2006 02:08

Valerio Manfredi's The Oracle

Valerio Manfredi came into prominence with his Alexander novels which, for me at least, were unreadable. There's something with Alexander though; even Mary Renault foundered on him. So, Manfredi has joined the new thriller bandwagon and produced The Oracle.

The action starts in Greece when the military is taking over the universities. Heleni is the outspoken student leader who is in love with Claudio and they are part of a group of friends including Norman and Michel. When Heleni is killed and the friends betray her, you know you're being set up for I know what you did last summer kind of thing. Their fate is also tied up with a mysterious Mycenaean find which supposedly depicts the last voyage of Ulysses.

Flash forward to 10 years when Michel is a professor in the university. One by one the old players are being killed in a way that suggests a connection to mystic Greek rite. Michel and Norman, newly reunited, have to solve the mystery before they are made targets of vengeance too.

Like all the novels of its kind, it is sporadically interesting only when it talks about bygone eras and exotic rituals. Manfredi, fortunately, is a scholar in ancient Greece and what he has to offer is make for a good reading. Otherwise, plotting is slipshod and writing even worse.

Or maybe because I have read so many of these kind of novels in the last two months that I am so cruel with this one. Like The Geographer's Library, Labyrinth and their ilk, this one too has at its centre the issue of immortality. Only the immortal here is Ulysses who has survived the tortures Homer had planned for him in The Odyssey and here has become the punisher.

And Manfredi uses this immortal punisher, with just the right touch of violence (neither less nor more), to punish all those evil military colonels and foreign diplomats (for once just British not American) who had stopped the glorious revolution in the university, in its tracks.

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I Walk in the Frost

October 15th 2006 04:00

I walk in the frost,
Both excited and lost,
Thinking of warm things,
Love and other beginnings.

I walk in the rain,
Both dazed and sane,
Dreaming of things that please,
A million odd possiblilties.

I walk in the sun,
Both hopeful and undone,
Counting things that never were,
Counting things that still are dear.

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Eulogium on the Death of Amicus--Part 2

October 14th 2006 09:35

After that incident, I found him distracted, heavy furrows in his bulging forehead. I did not pester him out of his reverie, for as our great teacher had taught us, thinking is the greatest virtue of a man’s life and I would not cheat even bulldogs out of it.

He blocked my way, one day when I was walking. I looked up in his face which was as intently serious. We had our last conversation which in many respects was so true to his fundamental nature that I cannot but describe it you. Alas, it was also his last conversation.

“You know, Callianus, if it were not for you, I would probably be wallowing as a Kantidean. But, you taught me to ask questions, so I have a great question for you, Callianus,” he said.

“Glad to know, Amicus, that you have questions for us. And what could your question be?”

“Life is an end in itself, Callianus, and to enjoy this end in itself, we have to think. Therefore, thinking is a virtue and a virtuous man spends his life thinking,” he opened rather breathlessly.

“Yes, Amicus, you are very right” I said to him.

“According to you, thinking is required to spend a good life and life can be only good if there is a lot of good thinking. Now, you must surely have heard about the death of Archimedes.”

“Ah, Archimedes. I have heard of him.”

“He was thinking very hard, Callianus, when a Roman soldier came and asked him if he was Archimedes. For you see, the soldier had a standing order to kill every citizen in the town except Archimedes. But Archimedes was thinking so hard, he answered that he did not know who Archimedes was and the next thing you know, he was beheaded by the Solider.”

“Oh, yes. Roman soldiers. They are brutes.”

“So, Archimedes was thinking and he lost his life because of it. For if he were not thinking, he would have answered the Roman soldier that he himself was Archimedes and thus, would have been spared the beheading.” he finished in triumph.

“Listen to my story, Amicus and I will tell you how Aesop died. He was deep in thinking, our Aesop, framing his little fables in his mind. An eagle that day had hunted a turtle for its food and was flying in the sky with the dead turtle in its beak. The turtle was too heavy, Amicus, and the eagle’s beak got slack with tiredness, so the eagle dropped the turtle. Where else should the turtle fall except on out friend Aesop’s head? And because the turtle fell from such a great height and because our friend was quite bald and had no hair which could absorb the shock, his head split open into two. Your solider, my dear Amicus, is like my turtle. We should not stop thinking because of them, my dear.”

“How wise you are, dear Callianus. I tell you a story and you come up with a better story to confirm my moral, just like that! Your story and my story confirm the same moral, Callianus. They both disprove your axiom that thinking is required for life. Thinking, Callianus, has surely lead Archimedes and Aesop, not to life but to death.”

I confess I was a little taken aback at this and I plunged my finger into his thick skull and said, “You are not thinking in principles, Amicus. Think in principles.”

Any other day he would be abashed at such an admonition but he was unrepentant that day. “I am thinking in principles, Callianus, for I have just disproved your principle.”

“Then, think in fundamentals Amicus,” I said to him, repeating my second favorite admonition.

“Do you mean whether I can establish that thinking was the primary cause of Archimedes’ death? Do you want to argue that the primary cause of Archimedes’ death was the Roman Soldier, for it is his hand and his choice that took the head off Archimedes’ neck?”

I stared at him rather quellingly.

“I disagree with you, Callianus,” he went on. “For the primary cause of Archimedes’ death was his own choice to think. If he had not chosen to think and answered the question, the soldier would not have chosen to raise his sword against him. Therefore, Callianus, by choosing to think Archimedes had chosen to die.”

I confess then I had lost all my patience with him and started on one of my angry rants. “Hegelian Iacchus has taken your soul, Amicus! Think in abstractions,” I said using my third favorite admonition.

That stopped him for a moment but our Amicus is resilient like a bulldog.

“Do you mean to say just because Archimedes was going through the motions of thinking doesn’t mean he is thinking? But, Callianus, a man may be thinking any amount of thinking but he should always be thinking some. There is no such thing as zero amount of thinking, Callianus.”

Eagles are stubborn creatures. For it was at this moment, that an eagle was flying in the skies, clutching in its beak a rather fat turtle. But its beak was no stronger than previously and the eagle dropped the turtle again.

Our friend Amicus had quite a mane of bushy hair, but that proved insufficient to counteract the force of the falling turtle and the head of Amicus split into two.

Poor Amicus, had he not chosen to think so hard that day, he would surely have been alive today.

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Eulogium on the Death of Amicus--Part I

October 13th 2006 02:42

Friends, today we are gathered here to mourn the death of dear Amicus and you asked me to speak a few words about the departed soul. What can I say? Where can I begin? I am as devastated at the death of Amicus as I would be at the death of my favorite bulldog.

He was my bulldog, for would he not always follow my steps closely, as bulldogs follow their master’s footsteps? Or is it another breed of canine? I would be walking on the streets of Atlantis and there he was, following me, matching step to step. He would wear my heavy brow and walk my slow walk. I would laugh suddenly, amused at the little fancies my own brain conjured up and there he was, laughing knowingly, as if he too knew the secret. He was my disciple who never shared my joke.

It was true that I had initiated him into the way of Paganetics. He was one of many, and I am afraid, not the brightest, even though I must confess, he was one of the staunchest. He was older than me and had a pudgy face, a pendulous stomach and a shaggy beard, so you see my description of him as a bulldog is exact and concrete.

One day I gave him quite a bit of tongue lashing when he confessed to me that he had not yet made himself familiar with that little wonder called The Anthem of The Randian Apollo.

“Amicus,” I said to him, “do you want to spend your life as a mote of beam, given identity by a passing every ray of light? You call it a little book, Amicus. But that little book opens our eyes to the darkness of darkness and the lightness of light, the true nature of things. If you have not read the book yet, you are not fit to walk the walk with me.”

Yes, quite a bit of lashing it was and I am sorry to admit now, he was quite pained by it. Needless to say, he had not read the book before he died.

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The Crimson Petal and The White by Michael Faber

October 12th 2006 05:04

The Crimson Petal and The White By Michael Faber

Michael Faber is one of those guys(Jonathan Franzen and Philip Pullman are the others) who are regularly put up by the Brotherhood, zealously promoted and made into marquee stars even before you've registered their names. Faber is not quite there with Franzen or Pullman but he will be.

The blurb says that "is one of the most serious, and the funniest writers around." If The Guardian said that, it probably means that he is neither serious nor funny but is full of that juice which liberals are shot with through and through: bile. You can't call this novel bilious either. It's just plain boring.

The setting is turn-of-the-century Victorian England. Yeah, underneath all that prim stiff-necked, moral-spewing façade, there was a lot of dirt. I read somewhere that there were, hold your breath, at least 6000 prostitutes operating in London. Oh, dear! The hypocrisy of that don't-show-your-ankle age.

A certain section of intelligentsia has never stopped chest-beating even 100 years after the Dreadful Age has passed. The success of A French Lieutenant's Woman, another boring book turned into a classic attests to this fact. But, that novel arrived in the seventies. There is no justification for another rehash of the same thing to be promoted so aggressively nearly thirty years afterwards.

The Crimson Petal and The White is on the face of it a story dealing with the life of a young prostitute Sugar in the vile Victorian age. You are told she is spirited, sweet; OK, you have a ken for spirited sweet things, especially if they are prostitutes in Victorian England. But twenty pages into the novel, you wonder whether the author decided to read an entire shelf of Zola before sitting to write this one. This is not an original novel; it is an adaptation. Er, I mean, you take a nineteenth century open-your-eyes icon and do your own nineteenth century open-your-eyes take, substituing London for Paris. Seriously, no novel of Zola was this lengthy either.

After twenty-five pages, I am not feeling the rage against the system or the compassion for the victims I am supposed to feel, just boredom and wonder when this lengthy dreck of a book will finish. Or is that a too-bourgeoisie emotion to feel?

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The Shining City by Kate Forsyth

October 11th 2006 05:25

The Shining City by Kate Forsyth

The Shining City is the second book in Rhiannon's Ride series by Kate Forsyth. In the first book, Rhiannon kills a king's soldier during her escape from a Satyricon herd. She then falls into the hands of Lewen's family who decide to take her to the capital city. On the way, Lewen falls in love with her and is certain she will be pardoned.

In the second part, Lucescere is the shining city of the title. Contrary to Lewen's expectations, Rhiannon is not received well in the city. She is treated as a witch and then thrown into a horrible prison. Lewen, though a knight, is helpless in the matter. His own friend Olwynne, is in love with him and brews a love-potion so that he falls in love with her and forgets Rhiannon.

Kate Forsyth Source: Berkley Jove Authors

The matter with the freaky tower of ravens has not been cleared yet and the ruling clan of the shining city has plenty on their hands and they couldn't care less about this wild satyricon girl in their prison. A centuries-old conspiracy is brewing against the kingdom and there is plenty of intrigue but unexpected by everybody, it falls to Rhiannon to save the day.

This book is much better than the first one because, the plot is more interesting. I didn't like the whole Tower of Ravens thing in the first novel which consumes up the entire climax. Here though, Forsyth pulls out many unsuspected plot threads and makes the novel more entertaining. Rhiannon is a gutsy heroine which is another plus point for the series because the other characters are strictly cardboard.

I haven't read the third installment in this series yet nor the other fantasy works of Kate Forsyth. So I can't say for sure how good she actually is. But this series works mainly because of one thing: we watch so much injustice piled up against a beautiful woman and we can't control ourselves, we read on. It's a bit like the old formula of TV soaps. Come to think of it , it's being used even today. Think of Bree in Desperate Housewives. All in all, a good day's fun

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How power shifted in the ancient world

October 9th 2006 23:43

Following up on my post about capitalism in ancient world.

I was asked how power shifted from one kingdom to another in the
ancient world and how superpowers developed when they had no nukes
back then. I am not a historian or a scholar but I will explain from
what I know. They didn't have nukes but every bit of technology made a
huge difference.The appearance of iron drastically changed the way war
was fought, so did the appearance of horses and chariots and the
invention of wheel.

Assyria had developed battering ram by which it could smash walls of
the cities and take them and not just plant a long siege outside the
walls. It is probably because of this that Assyria had to deport huge,
captive populations, something that was repeated by the Babylonians.
This made Assyria and its national god Ashur much feared around the
known world then. It is my hunch and I am not sure but that's why the
world assur stands for powerful gods or demons in most of the
Indo-European mythologies (aesir in Norse mythology, asuras in
Hinduism and Budhism, ahura in Persian).

Horses and chariots too made a huge difference; Hyksos in Egypt had
toppled the existing regime and Mitanni in Near East established a
huge empire because of their skill with horses. The Hittites became a
superpower when they stole a master horse- trainer from Mitanni and
developed their own horses. They were also the first to use the navy
in a battle.

The Parthians were known for their skill of shooting arrows backward
while riding on horses. This skill had given them such an advantage
that they became a feared opponent of the Romans. We still preserve
the term Parthian Shot. Some say even the Scythians had mastered this
skill a few centuries before.

Stirrups brought another revolution. Huns, I think, were the first to
master their use and with them had crossed from Asian steppe to
European heartland, a feat repeated by Mongols a thousand years later.
Mastering the navy made Athens into a superpower, a feat replicated by
the British. Building vast roads and inventing the corvus helped the
Romans.

Logistics too play a huge part in warfare. It is not enough to raise
huge armies; you need to have a lot of planning to move them across
difficult terrains. And world's greatest leaders from Alexander the
Great to Napolean were known for exactly this skill. Those who did not
possess this skill, those who had large armies but not enough skill to deploy them properly, figures like Darius, became known for their
hubris.

Whether it be a wheel or a battering ram, a stirrup or a corvus, each
of these inventions had made as much difference to the ancient world
as nuclear weapons and long range missile do to ours.

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The Cults of Roman Empire By Robert Turcan

October 9th 2006 04:21

The Cults of Roman Empire deals with not the regular religion of the Romans but the number of foreign cults that flourished there. Rome, like any other cosmopolitan power, hosted any number of foreign peoples on its soil. These cults first took root among them and then would spread to the main city and the Roman peoples. Cybele came from Phrygia, Isis from Egypt, Mithra from Persia, Dea Syria as the name suggests came from Syria. It’s interesting to note that the paganism of the West is not much different from the paganism of East.

Some of the cults like Cybele or Mithras we know about. But, this book deals with even obscure cults like Dea Syria, Jupiter Neopolitanus, Elgabal etc.

Written originally in French by Robert Turcan and translated into Antonio Nevill, The Cults of Roman Empire is a scholarly, exhaustive work. The author examines each cult thoroughly, where it originated, how it was received in Rome and also provides an extensive list of archaeology sites by which we know what we know about each cult. I am no judge of the information provided but I do think the conclusions are a bit tendentious. I did take some of the information here as gospel only to find out after a little research that Trucan has not differentiated between opinion and fact.

Mithras Source : www.sunlit.hu

It is written in a lyrical though somewhat obtuse style, and you can detect the hallmarks of modern scholarship writing. I missed the old style, with its stiff formality and rigid structure. The problem with this book is that it is definitely written for one with some knowledge about the subject and Roman history. I stumbled on it accidentally and being interested in ancient religions, started reading the book. But it proved to be a bit difficult read because you don’t get the background information that you require to understand many of the concepts. Still, it was a rewarding read in the end.

The name of this blog incidentally comes from this book. Cenacle is a word used often in Catholic contexts but it also means a circle of writers. In this book, cenacle was a word used in the context of rituals of Mithraism. I had a rather obscure connection with Mithra myself (he is the tutelary god of my birth-star), and hence the name of this blog.

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A Glimpse of Capitalism in Ancient World

October 8th 2006 08:11

Ziggurat of Assur Source: Dearquologia.com

I found this suprebly fascinating account of capitalism in ancient world in Gwendolyn Leick's Mesopotamia: The Invention of the CIty which I reviewed before. Read on:

By giving the south Mesopotamian merchants an incentive to buy their tin at Ashur and to sell their wares, particularly fine textiles as well as perhaps copper imported from the Gulf via Ur, Ilshuma made Ashur into the hub of commercial connections. His successor, Erishum, claims to have made ‘silver, gold, copper, tin, barley and wool exempt from taxes’, thereby extending the favourable conditions for trade even further.

The copper and cloth that the Akkadians brought to Ashur were sold for silver and tin…….. It is likely that they took silver and cloth with them, and the Assyrians themselves set up their own trade representations in Anatolia, then a provincial country divided into many small principalities, rich in minerals and metals, and eager to acquire the latest fashion garments and cloth from Mesopotamia. Tin and Babylonian textiles, in several qualities, were transported from Ashur to central Anatolia, where the trading post (Assyrian karum) near Kanesh served as the main entrepot. Although, the government for Ashur seems to have levied some taxes, this was not a state but a private enterprise.

The merchants were entrepreneurs ‘driven by the desire to make profit’. Merchants worked in teams, usually composed of family members. The tin and cloth were transported to Kanesh by donkey caravan. They could either be sold there for silver and gold, which were sent back to Ashur, sealed, with a letter advising the recipient of the exact sum to expect, or else converted into other commodities, such as wool and copper, which were taken to other Anatolian towns, as far afield as the Black Sea, and exchanged there for silver and gold. The selling price for both tin and textiles was double the purchase price. ……….

A typical caravan from Ashur to Kanesh karum would consist of a team of five or six donkeys, in which each beast could carry a weight of 60 to 90 kilograms(2 to 3 talents)…………. It seems actual transport was handed over to specialist haulers who acted as representatives of the company.
Security does not seem to have been a great problem……………..Merchants across the Near East at that time had diplomatic immunity……..As the texts show, the merchants were well aware that ethical practice was essential to inspire confidence and secure repeat business. Weight stones were carefully checked and precise accounts were demanded by the partners of the company.

………………………………………................................................................

The merchant accounts have nothing to say about relations between the city and the local population, or about the role of the temples. This produces an impression that Ashur in the twentieth century BC was primarily a capitalist trading state whose wealth depended exclusively on mercantile enterprise, rather like Abbasid Baghdad of The Thousand and One Nights.

...........................................................................................................................

We are talking about 1800-1900 BC or thereabouts here. Ashur since then went to become the preeminent religious centre of Assyria and also, its political capital for many years. Assyria, remember was a world superpower in ancient times whose effect in religion, art and culture may be discerned even today.The site may be under water now. A dam was to be built close by. Normally, I woudln't have cared so much but I felt so sad after reading this. Ashur itself ahs not been excavated properly. The information above comes from the karum in Kanesh in Anatolia.

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The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

October 6th 2006 08:57

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers

The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers combines elements of two genres which are least attractive to me: science-fiction and horror. I do not like science-fiction novels becuase the science is always hokey and more often than not they end up moaning endlessly in a queer,dystopian world. I've never tried reading horror books like those written by Stephen King, Lovecraft either. Nevertheless, The Anubis Gates turned out to be a very pleasant surprise.

The novel opens with a vivid scene in which holes are punctured in the fabric of time using Egyptian mythology. In the modern times, Darrow is a businessman whose interests have turned to the occult. When he finds about these gaps in time, he plans getting rich by arranging a series of tours to past designed to meet certain historical figues.

The first planned trip is to meet Coleridge and so he takes Doyle, a Coleridge scholar along with him. Back in 19th century, Doyle is mugged by gypsies and left there. It is hard living out in those hard times and Doyle is conscripted in turn by rival group of beggars. The only bright spot for him is a hope to meet a poet called William Ashbless, whom he was researching back in future.

Meanwhile, London is plagued by a weird wolfman-like creature known as Dog Face Joe who is killing a lot of people, not the least a friend of Ms.Elizabeth Tichy, who will be the future wife of Mr.William Ashbless. Elizabeth is searching for Dog Face Joe in guise of a man, calling herself Jacky and meets Doyle, in one of the beggar slums.

The novel gets progressively more complex from there. The action is frenetic, non-stop and the first part ends on a breath-taking flourish. The second part is a bit slower than the first but concludes only after tying all the loose ends satisfactorily.

I did not like all the ghoulish elements and the novel is chock-full of them but I could still admire the skill by which Powers conjures up distant worlds with minimum effort and maximum speed. Sadly, Powers uses only a little Egyptian Mythology but whatever he takes, he uses it to standout effect. Even though I am not happy with his deterministic world-view, Powers provides for an amzingly complex but well thought-out conception of time.

The Anubis Gates was the second novel of Tim Powers and his first success. It has been reissued in Fantasy Masterworks series and there are few novels in any genre which can beat it for sheer chutzpah.

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Jack Maggs by Peter Carey

October 5th 2006 01:46

Jack Maggs is a convict who returns to London even under threat of hanging on exposure. He is supposed to meet a certain gentleman but finding that gentleman’s house empty, is recruited into the opposite household as a footman.

The household belongs to a green grocer turned gentleman who is trying his best to be respectable. He throws one dinner party which is attended by one Tobais Oates, a newly sensational author who is also something of a mesmerist. Maggs is forced to act as a footman to the party, a job for which he is most unsuitable. When he has an attack of tic doulouroeux, Tobias steps in and hypnotizes him to calm him down. And now the sensational author has found his new victim.

Tobias is sure that behind Jack lay some sensational story which he can exploit. Tobias has a secret of his own too; he is having an affair with his young sister-in-law. Jack of course has a secret and he wants to keep it to himself and into this cat and mouse game Mercy, the maid and other interesting characters are drawn.

Jack Maggs by Peter Carey

Tobias is an interesting but typical character which pops in and out of Carey’s fiction. A wannabe geographer fighting the unhospitable bush terrain of Australia in Oscar and Lucinda or a literary fake posturing as a genuine artist in Theft, Carey’s fiction is laced with men with strong passions but little genius. Their overwhelming impulse is to be known as scientific men of renown and they are willing to do anything for it. Of all these characters, I think Tobias is the best drawn one.

The novel swims in a wet sensuality of heightened memory and is mildly entertaining. Carey is widely held have been in instrumental in raising an Australian literature and he has done this by capturing those flashes of memory Aussies have of themselves (Kelly gang in True History of Kelly Gang, colonization in Oscar and Lucinda). Jack Maggs deals with the prisoner exports and by having a convict return to London, Carey is examining the birth of a new nation and the desire even of a convict to return to the mother country. As Maggs keeps on saying, “I’m an Englishman”, but is he?

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No Excuses for the Left :The Holy Cow of Palestine

October 3rd 2006 05:55

David Aaronovitch’s documentary No Excuses for Terror is doing the rounds of blogs around the world. It is a fairly damning indictment of the Left’s capitulation or worse, co-option of terrorism everywhere in the world. You can find the documentary here.

The movie however notes the facts but carefully stops from remarking on them. It doesn’t give even a single reason as to why Left has become an accessory to modern terrorism. It looks like some sections of Left apologising for the other sections of Left, saying in effect, we’re not all nuts here. Playing good cop, bad cop.

While at it, the movie also looks at the single, monolithic, no-dissent-allowed demonising of Israel. I am not a supporter of Israel, nor of Palestine. I have never been able to understand the centrality of Palestine issue in the world affairs. Millions are wiped out in ten days in Rwanda and the world barely registers. Thousands are killed in Darfur and the world hardly blinks an eye. There is a small gunshot or a riot in Palestine , it’s a front page news everywhere, Why? The documentary notes this too but without asking the question that should asked of the Left: Why?

Palestine is routinely presented as the biggest obstacle to world peace. Why? When somebody like Mr.Bush prosecutes his war on terror and rightly gives the “issue” the cold shoulder, he is advised by all and sundry to solve the Palestinian issue first and well, everything else will be solved automatically. How? Why should lives of people the world over be made hostage to what happens in this small dinky corner of the planet? I am not a Jew or a Christian or a Muslim or a Liberal and I assume there are at least a billion people like me and well, we’re not interested in what happens there.

The Jews built their temple here and thought that the restoration of the temple will be their restoration to an angry God. The Christians in turn made this their holy land and the Muslims followed suit. Not to be outdone, the leftists came next and thought well, if they can only erect a secular state in this piece of land, they can conquer the world imagination. A secular state on the holy land of Jerusalem. Just imagine. Followed by secular states everywhere.

This gives us a clue to Left as a social group. Yeah, of course like any other socio-political entity it posits itself by some principles. But, it’s existence owes not to the careful application of these so-called principles but like any gang it depends on just one thing: muscle. What it wants is a direct access to a collective imagination. Hence, whatever holds the imagination of a collective, thither go our friends. Principles? What principles?

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We are all cowboys now ( and ever)

October 2nd 2006 03:41

The Divine Procreation Source:agnet.org

Cow-breeding is the basis of all civilizations. It is the very impulse of civilization. Until, we started breeding cows, we didn’t even feel the need to invent a civilization.

The Vedas which form the oldest religious literature extant are all about cattle-herding nomads who were moving across vast tracts of land and fighting cattle-stealing Panis and the dark raiders called Dasyus. Their god Indra was the ultimate cowboy, having retrieved the stolen cattle from a cave where they were hidden by the cattle-thieving dragon called Vala which was slain by our hero. Cattle-rustling, therefore, is the germ of all evil.

Not to be outdone, Egyptians worshipped a cow-goddess called Hathor. She was one of their oldest deities they had and one of the chiefest. Crete of course had a passionate love-affair with cows. The Cretan princess Pasiphae fell in passionate love with a cow and out of their union came the Minotaur. If this myth were read euhemeristically, one can imagine a cow boy past for Cretans at least on one side of the family.

And those snotty Europeans who sniff at the American cowboys with scorn should do well to remember that their eponymous ancestor from whom they derived their very name was a cow. Papa Zeus used his bull-sized bullocks to empty into the bovine beauty Europa, the union which produced the continent of Europe. The illustrious ancestry explains the rather bovine intelligence of present day Europeans. Cows, you see, are gormless creatures that are always driving themselves into trouble. That is why they need some hot men to shepherd them to safety.

The one people who were definitely not cowboys were Jews and that is why they don’t exactly fit in this cow-herding world because they were herding sheep (wandering Jews and all that). Yahweh is a jealous god because he was a sheep god and the one god he was most jealous of all, Baal of the Canaanites, is a cow god! But poor Jews were always being attracted to cow-worship. It is this incessant attraction that nagged Yahweh so much that he thought to buy them off with a piece of choice real estate.

But Yahweh’s doppelganger Allah wags a threatening finger at all the cow-herders. His idea of victory is not that his own sheep people should follow him and leave the idolatry of cow people but that there should not be any cow people at all. He tries to buy off sheep people who obliterate cow-herders with a prime real estate with seventy juicy bonuses, only on the other side. The clash of civilizations rightly is between the people of the cow and the people of the sheep.

This brings us to Americans. Cowboys are the greatest emblem of American culture apart from cheerleaders and air guitarists. There is something blessed about this young nation reminding us all about our immigrant, cow herding past, the cow-blood that we have in all of us. We need reminding. No matter how many decadent rags we piled up on our outer selves, our inner life, our myths, our religions and hence the very stuff of our ideas have been shaped at one point of time by tending to cows.

When the world is coming to nuts by the inherent jealousies of those sheep-herding tower-collapsers, it is entirely fitting that the civilised cow-breeding world should be marshalled by a cowboy president.