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First things first: the table of contents have been announced for Saros issue six! I can’t wait for you guys to read this one. We’ve got four all-time great stories, and some amazing artwork. Release date is still TBD but it’s going to be dropping soon. In the meantime, you can check out back issues here. Now onto this week’s post.

Grey aliens scared the hell out of me as a kid. The greys would watch me from my bedroom window at night and sneak around my room when they thought I was asleep. Not cool! Adults tried to tell me aliens weren’t real, they were just something on TV. But here’s the thing: I knew Worf and Chewbacca and the blue guy from Animorphs were fake aliens because they were owned by big American corporations, but no one owns the greys, not even the X-Files guy. There’s no trademark protection for them. Then the adults conceded that aliens might be real somewhere out in the vast cosmos, but insisted it was unlikely they were visiting my bedroom at night, because the odds were infinitesimal that life would evolve elsewhere in a humanoid shape and even more infinitesimal that they would travel all this way, single me out, etc. But that just made it worse! Because what the adults were really saying was that the creatures visiting my room at night were so powerful that they literally couldn’t fathom how they accomplished these things. Then I got older and the threat receded, and it turned out UFOs were mostly just illegal government tricks in the sky, which felt bad in a new, more adult way, and made me miss that feeling of being scared. These novels are more about UFOs, not greys, but they touched on that feeling in a way the latest round of government disclosure propaganda can only envy.

Terrestrial by Suzy Enyon
Malarkey Books, 2026; 90 pages

Something people forget about life basically at all times between June 8, 1947 (Roswell, New Mexico headline day) and September 11, 2001 (arbitrary date picked from the calendar) is that we all believed—not necessarily that aliens were real, but that we were going to have to deal with this UFO stuff sooner or later. Deal with it with a shotgun and some dynamite, or with the diplomatic protocol developed in the fragile postwar years when the nation states realized they had to unite if not in the name of brotherhood then for the purpose of staving off a world-ending war. Nowadays we believe that UFOs are government tricks in the sky. This book captures that older feeling, that older belief, and uses it to tell a very powerful story.

It captures a lot of other things too. It brought back memories of childhood UFO obsession, but also of seeing american high schools on tv that had outdoor parts, for lockers or to move between classes, and being weirdly fascinated by that. But what it captures best is the isolation of being a teenager, and the sense of wonder you can develop in spite of that. Also, that stuff about who to sit next to on the bus sent shivers down my spine—I’d completely forgotten about that one specific form of torture. The stuff with her sibling, same thing. The book captures the feeling of being alone at the time in your life when you most need to be social, of feeling watched when no one is watching. But it also captures that feeling that comes when you realize yeah okay you’re alone, but you can do something about it, you can act.

The Coffin of Honey by Geoffrey Morrison
Coach House Books, 2026; 304 pages

The world is split in two: the capitalists once again form their own side, the Communards the other, but it’s the people on the margins, the Communard-sympathizing workers of the capitalist world, who are most likely to be visited by the UFOs, a still unexplained but increasingly common phenomena. This all kicks off when a UFO briefly abducts (invites?) a minor communist functionary in Kerala while he’s in the middle of giving a speech. An agent from the ███ is sent to sow chaos, and a group of Communard comrades along the Caspian Sea research the UFO phenomenon at their library. It’s a lot of fun, very funny, and shows a real love and erudition when it comes to language(s).

The novel is full of big ideas and fun plays on language, here are a few of my faves:

• a really great play on the phrase ‘living space probe.’

• “It was a strange country right down the heraldic level, and if a country produces strange letterheads and postage stamps then it is quite inevitable it will produce strange men.”

• The Communards have perfected the idea of the mentat: “Communards access their internet on ‘thin client’ terminals belonging to the same supercomputer, typically housed in a facility that doubles as a library and archive for printed material. This internet is low-fi, homespun, and – it must be said – boring. Homepages resemble those of small-town local history museums circa 1996. Yet these pages are remarkably up to speed on global affairs, scientific developments, and even pop-cultural touchstones on our side of the wall. This is thanks to the work of the so-called Selectors, who are granted the unique privilege of access to ‘the capitalist internet’ – our, normal internet – to retrieve content as requested by community members. Per ipit, the capitalist internet is cognitively deleterious, and should only be accessed by trained specialists. Selectors are never permitted to fulfill the role for longer than a year, out of concern for their physical and mental health, and their vitals are monitored by two Attendants as they work. This so-called somatic quarantine would be almost endearing were it not such a blatant attempt at censoring the free flow of information. ipit’s defenders doggedly insist that their only concern is public health. They are especially troubled by what they call ‘bogeys’ – the free-floating, monetized, generative ai hallucinations which are such a feature of our online landscape that we can hardly imagine a world without them.”

• “And now I am here. Now I am this. Now I know there are meanings behind meanings, and means behind means, and time never really passes, and I am writing a journal entry for Dr K████ and Professor F█████ that I will encode with a one-time pad and broadcast over a shortwave frequency numbers station. The radio waves will bounce off the ionosphere and straight into the ears of God, who is waiting in an undisclosed location.”

Morrison is a long sentence guy, but he’s not out to punish us the way certain Germanic writers are.1 If anything, he knows his position isn’t the dominant one, so he’s an apologist out to win people over. His prose is always captivating, and he switches up the long sentences with short chapters. When he finally hits us with his bravura piece, the Bell Letterist’s Belle Letter, the big manifesto that’s the key to the whole novel, we’re ready for it, waiting to see what he can do.

Both of these are books where even once you reach the end, you know you’re not finished with them. I hope you’ll check them out.

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P.S. I’ve moved my coverage of Samuel Pepys’s diary over to the Notes app.

More Books:

• Missing Person: Alice by Simon Mason and The Burning Origin by Daniele Mencarelli

• Adam’s late winter reading recommendations: Ultramarine, The Blood Countess, The Beggar Student, and Blood Bound: Unlacing Secret Ties

• Inger Christensen’s The Painted Room

• A brilliant comic book and two war stories: Hobtown Mysteries, The Fort Bragg Cartel, and The German Prisoner

• 10 Things I Learned About the Bronze Age from The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

• Journeys to Renaissance Italy… And Yorkshire: Florenzer, Romola, The Throne, Perspective(s), A God in Need of Help, and The Gallows Pole

• Two sophisticated novels for adults, and one with dinosaurs: Audition, Good Will Come from the Sea, and Adam & Eve in Paradise

• Summer reading roundup: The Midnight Project by Christy Climenhage; Bodies of Summer by Martin Felipe Castagnet; The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski

• Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton

• Eurotrash by Christian Kracht and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• Command Performance by Jean Echenoz

• Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zamba

• A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré

• Satellite Image by Michelle Berry

• Fulgentius by César Aira

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

• Awful People by Scott Mitchel May

• Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest by Ariel Gordon

PPS here’s a fun website to visit: https://sinceyouarrived.world/taken

About Me | Instagram | Goodreads | Letterboxd

I have started practicing a new method that’s making me more powerful than ever before. Actually it’s a very old method. Ancient. I’ve begun keeping lists. You laugh. Lists are just things you stick on the fridge or in your phone, you think. Wrong. We have literature because ancient Mesopotamian priests started keeping lists. The second book in one of the greatest works of literature ever written is mostly just a list of ships. You ever meet like a hardcore Maoist or Trotskyist, not like the joke ones, but the ones who know what they’re talking about? Their secret is that they keep lists. For now, my lists are simple. I make two, every night before bed. One is a list of writing-related stuff I want to do the next day, the other is a list of everything else I want or have to do the next day. Usually there’s about fourteen points, though two or three items will be trivially easy to cross off (every day’s list ends with ‘make a list for tomorrow’). I’m never able to cross off everything on the list. That’s not the point. But if I can get five or six things, I’m having a good day. Even more, even better. Fewer things crossed off, I gotta rethink something. It’s proving very effective. I’m wasting less time on twitter, feeling more accomplished, growing more powerful. I recommend it.

Anyway, here’s a bunch of movies I watched recently.

Nine Queens (Nueve reinas) (2000)
Directed by Fabián Bielinsky
Starring Ricardo Darin, Gastón Pauls, and Leticia Brédice
114 minutes

Really great little Argentinean film. A very smalltime conman (he starts off getting caught doing the fast hands asking for too much change thing) gets involved with a more experienced pro, who promises to spend the day showing him the ropes.

After a couple of little scams around Buenos Aires, they hit upon rumours of a forgery of the Nine Queens, a set of stamps from the Weimar Republic that are worth a fortune. They also have a mark: A Venezuelan businessman set to be deported the next day, meaning if he wants to buy the stamps, there isn’t time for a chemical test. There are a lot of great twists that keep the transaction from going smoothly, and their own cut of the loot keeps dwindling as they promise more and more people a cut in exchange for some essential service.

The more experienced conman has a sister and a brother who work at the hotel the Venezuelan stays at: the sister knows her brother’s a scumbag, the little brother doesn’t know, but will. It’s clear one of the two conmen is going to screw the other over—in fact, it’s clear they suspect each other and are working against each other, though we’re never sure how the other is going to betray them. I really liked the first ending, where they manage to get their payday in the form of a cheque only to find there’s been a bank run—what a great ending for an Argentinean film. The second ending, was a little too Hollywood neat. I don’t think it worked. At any rate, I really loved the game of this film, and I’ll need to watch it again soon.

Owning Mahowny (2003)
Directed by Richard Kwietniowski
Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman, Minnie Driver, John Hurt, and Maury Chaykin
104 minutes

This one’s about a guy addicted to losing money while gambling, which leads to the obvious problem of what to do when you run out of money, which he solves by embezzling funds from his employer, the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. I personally don’t gamble because I’m bad at math and hate sports, but I’ve known a one or two real gamblers and I know exactly the feeling PSH’s character is getting out of losing, it’s not all that different from the sort of feeling you get when you spend too much time scrolling, playing video games, etc, any repetitive task like that, the dopamine rush makes you feel accomplished even when you’re losing, when you know you’ve hit diminishing returns and you’re wasting your time, and the feeling is constantly weaponized against us because it actually does feel kinda good. Anyway, this is a great film, an honest look at a problem gambler and what he’ll do to get his fix, that feeling of tunnel vision. It’s not romanticized at all, but I worry today’s young problem gamblers won’t get anything out of it because as pathetic as this all is, it’s miles away from today’s app-based gambling. Up there with Atom Egoyan’s Chloe (or is that Montreal?), that one Sara Polley film, and Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie in terms of movies that make Toronto look cooler than it is.

The Mastermind (2025)
Directed by Kelly Reichardt
Starring Josh O’Connor and Alana Haim
110 minutes

Apparently inspired by the crime films of Melville. I can see it, but it reminded me more of the novels of Jim Thompson, the Dimestore Dostoyevsky: an American down on his luck tries something drastic only to find out how much worse things can get. I enjoyed it.

The Last Viking (Den sidste viking) (2025)
Directed by Anders Thomas Jensen
Starring Mads Mikkelsen and Nikolaj Lie Kaas
116 minutes

Mads Mikkelsen plays a slow person who thinks he’s a viking and frequently tries to kill himself by jumping out of windows. His bankrobber brother entrusted him with his last score, now he’s out of jail and wants to find it, but is disturbed that his brother now insists he’s John Lennon, and to retrieve the cash will have to reunite The Beatles. I liked the stuff about how we have to balance reality with the illusions that we allow ourselves and our loved ones, but the stuff from the animated section about a forced equality, I didn’t understand what they were trying to get at. Is this some Scandinavian attempt at an anti-woke thing? Some bit of Danish discourse that eludes me? Or is it because Søren Malling’s character is as delusional as the others, and so of course the metaphor in his book makes no sense?

Suspended Time (Hors du temps) (2025)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
Starring Vincent Macaigne, Micha Lescot, Nine d’Urso, and Nora Hamzawi
105 minutes

The Essayist has made the only good decent covid film. Vincent Macaigne is a natural neurotic, so it makes sense to get him to play an overly covid conscious person in the early part of the pandemic, and I like that it doesn’t drag any culture war bullshit into it. It’s just a very nervous guy, his brother, their girlfriends, a beautiful house in the country, and their various levels of tolerance for each other’s bullshit. Something Knausgaardian about it too, given that it’s the director’s actual home and backstory, so I guess the ex-wife he meets at the end is meant to be his IRL ex-wife, the director Mia Hansen-Løve, etc etc. I wouldn’t recommend seeking this one out, necessarily, but I certainly didn’t consider it a waste of my time, either.

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More movies:

• Adam’s Holiday Movie Recommendations 2025, Part One

• Adam’s Holiday Movie Recommendations 2025, Part Two

• Adam’s Holiday Movie Recommendations 2024

• The Wonders (2014), Borgo (2024), Richelieu (2023)

• The Beasts (2022)

• The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), The Night Of (2016), and Les Sauvages (2019)

• Secret Agent (2025), Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie (2025), Blue Ruin (2013), The Duellists (1977)

About Me | Instagram | Goodreads | Letterboxd

Hello everyone, and welcome, especially all the new subscribers who’ve signed up in the last week or two. I’m not entirely sure where you’ve come from, my best guess is that one note I did about ‘meekmaxxing,’ but I’m glad you’re here.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Game of Thrones, and I’ve just thought of something I want to add to that.

Which is, if you’re a fan of the books, then you need—need—to check out this other, earlier series, The Accursed Kings, by Maurice Druon. It runs for seven books, starting with the rule of King Philip IV of France aka the Iron King (The Iron King is the name of the first book).

You need to read it because it’s the original Game of Thrones. That’s not me calling it a knockoff, that’s Martin himself in the intros he wrote for the recent reissues of the books. He’s a big fan of them, and you can see it all over the place. They’re about dynastic power and the big names in history books, but they also manage to explore the lives of a lot of common people, too. Druon’s first book in particular is about a common man who rises to become the King’s right hand man, who briefly manages to use his power for good, until chaos breaks out when he is wrongly condemned to death—that’s basically how Martin kicks off the plot of his own series.

Here’s one of my favourite passage in the whole series:

In every period and in every country there have always been two parties: the reactionary and the progressive. These two tendencies came face to face at the King’s Council. Charles of Valois considered himself the natural head of the great barons. He was the incarnation of the permanence of the past, and his political gospel derived from certain principles which he was prepared to defend to the last: the right of private war between the great barons, the right of the great feudal overlords to coin money within their own territories, a return to the morality of chivalry, submission to the Holy See as the supreme arbitrating power, and the maintenance of the feudal organisation of society in its integrity. All those things which had become established owing to the circumstances of society in previous centuries and which now Philip the Fair, inspired by Marigny, had abolished or still sought to overthrow. Enguerrand de Marigny stood for progress. His main ideas concerned the centralisation of power, the unification of finance and administration, the independence of the civil power from religious authority, external peace by fortifying strategic towns and permanently garrisoning them, internal peace by enforcing submission to the royal authority, the augmentation of production and commerce, and the security of communications. But there was another side to the medal: police proliferated, and they were as expensive to maintain as fortresses were to build. Vehemently opposed by the feudal party, Enguerrand succeeded in rallying to the King a new and growing class which was gradually becoming aware of its own importance: the middle class. On many occasions, for instance, when it was a question of raising taxes or over the affair of the Templars, he had called upon the middle class of Paris to gather before the Palace of the Cité. He had done the same thing in various provincial towns. He had in his mind the example of England, where the House of Commons was already functioning. As yet, these small French assemblies had no right to discuss, they were merely to listen to the measures the King proposed and approve them.

So yeah, the books are also a series of meditations on the intricacies of power in a non-democratic state—so it should come as no surprise that these are also said to be Vladimir Putin’s favourite books.

But getting back to Martin, it’s not just all the similarities in plot points and themes that make The Accursed Kings the original Game of Thrones, there’s something that goes right to the voice of the books as well. But again, I’m not saying Martin’s a copycat. I think he is (probably unknowingly, lol) engaging in a practice that Ancient Greek and Roman writers and then Renaissance humanists employed, called imitatio. The simplest way I can describe imitatio is to say that it’s about building the next link in a chain of tradition, but building it in such a way that it points back to where it came from. It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, and hope to have more to say about it soon.

Druon, by the way, was a really interesting guy. He and his uncle Joseph Kessel were in the French resistance, and Kessel turned his experience into a book called Army of Shadows, which Jean-Pierre Melville later turned into one of my favourite films of all time.

There’s one last way in which the two series are similar, and which I hope will work to convert Game of Thrones fans, and it’s that the first few books all came out within a few years of each other, and then there was a seventeen year wait for the last book, and it sucked, it’s the worst in the series. Here is how book six ends, and the joke is on you if you think Martin’s books are going to end differently:

AT THIS POINT THE AUTHOR, COMPELLED BY HISTORY TO KILL OFF HIS FAVOURITE CHARACTER, WITH WHOM HE HAS LIVED FOR SIX YEARS, IS MOVED TO A SORROW COMPARABLE TO THAT OF KING EDWARD OF ENGLAND; THE PEN, AS THE OLD CHRONICLERS SAY, FALLS FROM HIS HAND, AND HE HAS NO DESIRE TO CONTINUE, AT LEAST FOR THE PRESENT, EXCEPT TO INFORM THE READER OF THE DESTINIES OF SOME OF THE PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS IN THIS STORY.

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Thanks for reading!

More from Adam’s Notes:

• I did not win a literary prize today, but that’s okay

• I GoT Mad at the Television

• The surveillance state is listening

• Dreaming of 2025

• One Weird Naming Convention of Milan’s Medium Elite Families

• The Necromancer of the Colosseum (Real)

• The Painted Room in Mantua

• Bembo’s bad boarder: Part One, Part Two

• Fulgentius

• 10 Wild Things I Learned About the Bronze Age from The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

And finally, a reminder that I’m guest-editing issue six of Saros. We’re looking for stories and essay pitches. Full details at the website.

Last week I mentioned that being longlisted for a prize acts as a great credential, a sign that people can take you seriously as a writer. But something else I love about the CBC Short Story Prize in particular is how public-facing it is. I had a lot of people who just don’t know this side of me message me their congratulations, which was fun.

The short list for the CBC Short Story Prize was announced this morning and, alas, I did not make the cut from the long list.

A friend asked if I’m disappointed, and while I would have loved to win, I’m really just excited to have been longlisted, twice now. , publisher of Malarkey Books, has a motto that I think about a lot, “Stuff leads to stuff.” What he means is that doing these sort of things doesn’t always lead to the outcome you’re hoping for, but that by participating you open up more opportunities for yourself, chances to try again. For example, if a person took the time to compose an entry but didn’t win, they now have a short story they can either work on with their writing group or send out to other contests and literary journals. Stuff leads to stuff.

As it happens, while I was waiting for the news to come in, I had a book review accepted by a literary journal, and another fun opportunity came up as well. So there’s your proof: stuff leads to stuff.

Thanks to E.M. White and Eric Williams, who both offered valuable feedback on my story, more than a year ago now. Check out their blogs!

Night Squad by David Goodis
Vintage, 1961; 276 pages.

So this guy watches some hoods roll a drunk, sort of helps the drunk but doesn’t actually stop the robbery. The guy is an ex-cop, kicked off the force for taking bribes. He goes into the bar, meet his ex-wife and her new fella, who she seems not to actually like. Our protagonist, the ex-cop, is a loser, such a loser that he goes to the poker game in the back of the bar and they don’t let him play, but they don’t bother to kick him out either. They let him watch. Two masked gunmen interrupt, try to kidnap the local gangster running the game. Our guy stops it by killing one of the gunmen, the gangster’s henchman subdues and then kills the other one, even though it would be better to question him.

The local gangster takes our guy home, offers him $15,000, plus a gun and some walking-around money to solve the crime, but the real prize is the hidden stash the gunmen were after. Now here’s the twist: on his way home, our guy gets picked up by the Night Squad, the dirtiest cops in town, and they offer him his job back if he can get the dirt on the gangster they don’t know he’s just agreed to work for. They even give him back his badge and a new gun.

David Goodis is one of the great noir writers, albeit a tier below the all-time greats, Dashiel Hammett and Jim Thompson and so on, but this is a later work from Goodis, and not his best. He’s solid on the plot (although maybe he has too much, there are lots of minor characters who end up too connected to the story) but he doesn’t create the atmosphere his earlier books have, it’s just one thing after another, which is a shame because atmosphere is what lifts noir up above mere pulp. It’s even more of a shame because the book has a really interesting setting—a slum neighbourhood on the edge of a swamp—and a couple of neat ideas: the protagonist carries on a running, internal conversation with his badge, which represents his better angels chiding his guilty conscience; he carries a scar from a rat biting him as a baby, it occasionally itches to remind him of the wretchedness of the town’s poverty; the gangster boss has an obsession with Chinese culture, but not much is made of it. Even the femme fatale falls a bit flat.

The problem of the novel isn’t that the protagonist is torn between corruption and the righteous path, but that the author is conflicted, unsure just how and in what way our protagonist is a fallen creature, and unsure how far he wants to go with any one plot. Another demerit is that once in a while it’s hard to tell what decade this novel takes place in, mostly it feels like it’s in the forties or fifties, Goodis’s heyday, but then once in a while he’ll try to throw in a detail to try and make it feel current, putting the novel in the sixties, and it ends up feeling a bit jarring.

Ultimately, this is one of those pulp books that’s not good, but not good in an inspiring way, because it makes you see how it could be better. If you’re anything like me, you can’t help but stop reading every once in a while and try to fix the book in your head, figure out how you would make it work.

Verdict: Goodis is good, but he’s usually better than this. Skip this one until and check out his novels Shoot the Piano Player and The Moon in the Gutter.

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More Books:

• Missing Person: Alice and The Burning Origin

• Adam’s late winter reading recommendations: Ultramarine, The Blood Countess, The Beggar Student, and Blood Bound: Unlacing Secret Ties

• Inger Christensen’s The Painted Room

• Saxon Identities AD 150-900

• A brilliant comic book and two war stories: Hobtown Mysteries, The Fort Bragg Cartel, and The German Prisoner

• 10 Things I Learned About the Bronze Age from The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

• Journeys to Renaissance Italy… And Yorkshire: Florenzer, Romola, The Throne, Perspective(s), A God in Need of Help, and The Gallows Pole

• Two sophisticated novels for adults, and one with dinosaurs: Audition, Good Will Come from the Sea, and Adam & Eve in Paradise

• Summer reading roundup: The Midnight Project by Christy Climenhage; Bodies of Summer by Martin Felipe Castagnet; The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski

• Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton

• Eurotrash by Christian Kracht and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• Command Performance by Jean Echenoz

• Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zamba

• A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré

• Satellite Image by Michelle Berry

• Fulgentius by César Aira

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

• Awful People by Scott Mitchel May

• Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest by Ariel Gordon

About Me | Instagram | Goodreads | Letterboxd

I have some fun news this week that I’m so excited to share with you guys: my short story “The Ball Game” has been longlisted for the 2026 CBC Short Story Prize.

An earlier version of the same story was previously longlisted in the 2024 edition of the prize.

The short list will be announced next week (fingers crossed), and the the winner will be announced the week after that (fingers double crossed).

The shortlisted writers receive a cash prize, while the winner receives an even bigger cash prize and an artist’s residency in Banff, and while I’d love to win, the real prize is the credential that comes with making the list—it’s something that people can understand, peer recognition, an acknowledgment that you’re a ‘real’ writer.

Onwards!

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Missing Person: Alice by Simon Mason
riverrun, 2024; 229 pages

This is the best new crime fiction I’ve read in quite some time. It’s the first in a series of books designed to emulate Simenon’s Maigret mysteries—short, compulsive crime novels. It’s about a missing girl, and the way the narrative focuses on her final day, having us reconstruct what she was doing without telling us why, has this fascinating effect of reminding us of that huge gulf between childhood and adulthood. The past revisited as a foreign country.

I also really like how little of the protagonist we get: he grew up in Baghdad, his parents died in the invasion, and now he’s a finder, a word people call him more often than his actual name, which is Tlaib. The novel takes all these great dives into exposition so that you almost forget about him. I don’t know if the job of finder is made up or not. Essentially, he’s a contractor hired by British police agencies to look into missing persons cases. Clearly it’s a narrative ploy that allows him to move from one setting to another between books, but at the same time, the job reeks of austerity and budget cuts, making it feel plausible. So: probably invented but something the British will implement eventually (the job of detective mostly comes from fiction, too).

The ending had a perfect twist, I didn’t see it coming but it also felt inevitable. We don’t get the easy resolution of catching a murderer, yet the case does get solved, and part of the surprise is that the novel finds kind of a cleverly subversive way to avoid having the kid be the umpteenth victim of sexual violence in a novel of this sort, but neither does it deny that that sort of violence exists. Sorry if I’m being vague, I don’t want to ruin it. Again, I really loved how the protagonist was forced to keep revisiting the missing kid’s known movements, but any motives were completely inexplicable to him, a cognitive leap he just couldn’t make for himself, but by continually knocking his head against the wall of the case, he eventually finds a way forward. Will definitely be reading more of this series in the future.

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The Burning Origin by Daniele Mencarelli
Translated from the Italian by Octavian MacEwen
Europa Editions, 2025; 192 pages

I’m not sure why I decided to read this. I’d seen a bunch of positive reviews for it but I was a bit iffy on the premise—a successful designer in Milan copes with fame. I was worried it was going to be wish fulfillment, two hundred pages of the author imagining he’s rich. But no, that’s not it at all. It’s about the successful designer returning to Rome and connecting with his working-class friends, using his success as a way to examine the social divide.

Our protagonist is embarrassed. He’s followed his ambitions and abandoned his working-class friends, and he lies to keep his posh girlfriend from joining him on the trip home. Some of his friends, on the other hand, are embarrassed that they’re all fast approaching forty and that their lives haven’t really gone anywhere.

The prose is breezy, to the point that I kept thinking this would be a YA novel if it wasn’t about a midlife crisis, and yet at the same time it’s also kind of wonky, I often had to re-read dialogue to figure out who was speaking. But that said, I felt engrossed in these characters’ lives, like I’d known them for a long time.

In the end, there’s nothing resolved, but it captures the feeling, without being too sentimental, of reminiscing with people you have history with, and of the pains and consequences both of following your ambitions and being stuck in a rut. Both perspectives very relatable.

And finally, a reminder that I’m guest-editing issue six of Saros. We’re looking for stories and essay pitches. Full details here.

More Books:

• Adam’s late winter reading recommendations: Ultramarine, The Blood Countess, The Beggar Student, and Blood Bound: Unlacing Secret Ties

• Inger Christensen’s The Painted Room

• A brilliant comic book and two war stories: Hobtown Mysteries, The Fort Bragg Cartel, and The German Prisoner

• 10 Things I Learned About the Bronze Age from The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

• Journeys to Renaissance Italy… And Yorkshire: Florenzer, Romola, The Throne, Perspective(s), A God in Need of Help, and The Gallows Pole

• Two sophisticated novels for adults, and one with dinosaurs: Audition, Good Will Come from the Sea, and Adam & Eve in Paradise

• Summer reading roundup: The Midnight Project by Christy Climenhage; Bodies of Summer by Martin Felipe Castagnet; The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski

• Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton

• Eurotrash by Christian Kracht and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• Command Performance by Jean Echenoz

• Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zamba

• A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré

• Satellite Image by Michelle Berry

• Fulgentius by César Aira

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

• Awful People by Scott Mitchel May

• Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest by Ariel Gordon

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First, a reminder:

I am guest-editing issue six of Saros, and I’m having a blast reading the stories that have been sent in so far. Keep them coming! For some reason, I’m having a lot more fun than when I’m only reading submissions—even though so far that’s all I’ve been doing, reading. Curious. There are a lot of great stories, and even though most will be rejected, I feel like I have a lot of new names to keep an eye on. We’re also taking pitches for an essay! Full details can be found here.

A couple of weeks ago I finally watched the new Game of Thrones spinoff, A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms. Mostly I liked it. Actually, I think it’s my favourite GoT thing yet. I’ve always found myself in a weird place with Game of Thrones. I have some friends who absolutely love it and know all the lore, they have theories about what will happen and they agonize over whether George R.R. Martin will ever finish the books (he won’t, it’s fine). I also have a few friends who pretend to dislike it, because they claim to care about medievalism and they feel it’s misleading or even a betrayal somehow, that it plays off medieval stereotypes and gives the public the wrong image of the past, even though it’s a show about dragons set in an invented place.

As for myself, I just enjoy it. It’s okay. I like it more than I dislike it. I’ve read the main books and watched most of the show (I skipped half of season three or maybe four of the original run, which I found a bit plodding, having just read the relevant book). Admittedly there are a few plot lines I don’t follow too closely. A lot of ‘oh yeah, that guy.’ I couldn’t really tell you what’s happening in the second spinoff show. As for the pedantry, obviously I like medieval stuff, but I try not to take it too seriously here because it’s a fantasy about tits and dragons. I say ‘try’ though, because there is one thing that really irritates the life out of me, and it’s in almost every episode. See if you can figure out what I’m getting at:

That’s right. I’m talking about the goddamn candles. They put those things everywhere. They are absolutely profligate with them. The worst for me is when they leave candles burning unattended in long, empty hallways. It drives me crazy, for two reasons.

First of all, candles represented a lot of hard work back in the day. They didn’t just fall off the container ship, you had to have guys raising bees and all that sort of stuff. Packing the wax into barrels, shaping the wax into candles—there was no end to it. People burned rushlights (like a reed or something dipped in grease) as an alternative to candle wax because they were practically free, fish oil likewise I think was usually cheaper. The other reason all the candles annoy me is because you can’t leave candles burning unattended! That’s like, rule one of open flames. People were a thousand times more careful about candles back in our past, and they still had kitchen fires and whole cities burning down regularly.

I mean, for God’s sake, one of the things I’m most looking forward to in my Pepys coverage is the Great Fire of London in 1666, which burned down half or more of the city because a baker got careless.

Obviously we have to allow for some artistic license. In the main show when there’s an elaborate candle setup in the medieval conference room, those scenes don’t bother me as much, because obviously there was no medieval conference room. I let that sort of thing pass. And for the longest time I kept telling myself all the candles were going to be explained away as some sort of dragon magick. All I needed was that one red-haired witch to say the people of the dragon don’t burn easily or something, but no, didn’t happen, though sometimes I have to pretend it did.

Okay, sorry, I feel like I got carried away there. Need to go back to just mildly enjoying the show. I’m calm now. But just to prove I’m on the right side of history here, let’s end this week’s entry, with an extremely relevant excerpt from Pepys’s diary:

This night my boy Wayneman, as I was in my chamber, I overheard him let off some gunpowder; and hearing my wife chide him below for it, and a noise made, I call him up, and find that it was powder that he had put in his pocket, and a match carelessly with it, thinking that it was out, and so the match did give fire to the powder, and had burnt his side and his hand that he put into his pocket to put out the fire. But upon examination, and finding him in a lie about the time and place that he bought it, I did extremely beat him, and though it did trouble me to do it, yet I thought it necessary to do it. So to write by the post, and to bed.

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More from Adam’s Notes:

• Aye of Avignon: a chanson de geste

• Check Out This Guy I Found

• The Painted Room in Mantua

• The Demon’s Feast (Morgante)

• Bembo’s Bad Boarder

• Bembo’s Other Bad Boarder

• The Necromancer of the Colosseum

• Journeys to Renaissance Italy... and Yorkshire, for some reason...

• Saxon Identities AD 150-900 by Robert Flierman

• The Strange Case of Mary Carleton

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The Secret Agent (O Agente Secreto) (2025)
Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho
Starring Wagner Mourra
161 minutes

A man goes to Recife, Brazil, in the 1970s, to escape the brutal military dictatorship which is hunting him down. He moves into a sort of commune filled with dissidents and fellow refugees. His son lives with his in-laws nearby, he gets a job that puts him in contact with the local police. As he acclimates to his life, we learn why he’s on the run, and we learn there are two groups of people seeking him out: first, his old employer has hired a pair of hitmen to track him down, and then, much later— in our own time, actually—a pair of university researchers discover a number of documents and recordings related to our protagonist’s struggle, and one of them makes it her mission to find out what happened to him.

For all this intrigue, it’s also a bit of a hang out movie, taking time to show us carnival celebrations, the culture that’s developed around the movie theatre the protagonist’s father-in-law works at, and giving us an absolutely brilliant and hilarious sequence demonstrating the power that print tabloid culture held on people.

I absolutely loved The Secret Agent. It’s like a 70s conspiracy thriller, but also an evolution of the genre. The film is clear-eyed about the dangers of the reactionary state, but because it extends its timeline out by a generation, it’s able to overcome the cynicism and paranoia that until now has been the dominant mode of the genre.

I can’t wait to watch it again sometime. If you check out only one movie from today’s post, please let it be this one.

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie (2025)
Directed by Matt Johnson
Starring Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol
100 minutes

I was big fan of this one, too, although I cooled a little on the second watch. But then again, if I watched it twice, I couldn’t have disliked it that much, right?

Matt and Jay play a pair of would-be musicians who believe their fortunes will be made if they can just play a show at the Rivoli, a storied but not all that impressive venue in Toronto. They spend their days hatching increasingly elaborate plans and seeing them fall apart. What makes this all stand out is that the movie (and tv show and webseries that preceded it) have sequences filmed in public, supposedly without permits. Think Borat but without the mean spiritedness. Or rather, imagine if the long-running Quebec tv show Just for Laughs Gags had characters, plot, and dialogue.

I find I don’t really care for all the 90s nerd reference humour, although it’s at least a cut above anyone else doing this sort of comedy, and peppered through with bits of Canadiana that you won’t find elsewhere. Moreover, there’s a great chemistry between Matt and Jay that ranges from goofy to homoerotic, and it’s always fun to watch them riff something out, Jay at the piano and Matt at the whiteboard.

The plot of the movie is a direct ripoff of Back to the Future with the CN Tower standing in for the town clock in the original. The stuff filmed in public is audacious, and if I was letdown a bit on the second watch, it’s because I spent too much time listening to podcasts and youtube videos where Matt Johnson explains how he shot the film, and it’s better to just leave it alone or work it out for yourself.

You don’t need to watch the webseries or TV show to get this, but I highly recommend checking them out, the TV show in particular, which has some incredible sequences, such as the bank robbery, or the duo stealing a map from a museum in broad daylight and then escaping into Toronto’s subway tunnels.

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Blue Ruin (2013)
Directed by Jeremy Saulnier
Starring Macon Blair, Devin Ratray, & Amy Hargreaves
90 minutes

A homeless guy finds out the man who he’s pretty sure killed his parents is about to get out of jail, and decides to seek revenge, gets revenge pretty quick (maybe), then spends the rest of the film either hunted by or defending himself from the man’s family.

I loved the homeless survival stuff at the beginning, but then the movie lost me during the first home invasion scene where he lets the bad guys in and then panics because he doesn’t really have a plan even though he spent a whole day preparing for this, and fucks it all up. It won me back when it subverted the old cliche of the hero doing surgery on himself by having him just give up and go to a hospital.

It’s a compelling action movie and it wasn’t a disappointment by any means, but if you haven’t seen Saulnier’s Green Room (2015), start there, it’s a much better film. Also check out Hari Kunzru’s novel Blue Ruin (2024), it has no connection to this movie at all except for the title, but it’s a lot of fun, a book about covid and the world of contemporary art.

The Duellists (1977)
Directed by Ridley Scott
Starring Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel
100 minutes

I’m not going to say this happened to me. That would be too flippant. But I have fought a few duels in my time. It’s the first duel that lives most vividly in my mind, and yet it was a very brief affair. Pistols on the Commons at night. Thought I’d do the honourable thing and shoot at the moon, but the ingrate opposite then damn near took my ear off, so I put the next one between his eyes. Finished? On the contrary, only just begun! After that it was seven long years of exile. Oh, it’s fun at first, don’t get me wrong. You start out waylaying travellers at Canso and Amherst, stealing artifacts in Toulouse, a little love affair in Venice, all that. But after a while, the gambling debts pile up and locals just start to automatically assume you’re trouble, no matter what new town you end up in, and you yourself realize the authorities from back home aren’t the only ones on your tail—no, turns out the ingrate has a brother, equally intent on suicide à la moi. So we duke it out a few times, swords, jousting, pistols, once in a contraption called a “hot air balloon,” and twice at sea. The strange thing is—and Scott totally gets this—there is a shared fraternity between opposing duellists. It’s the maddest thing. One night we were fencing in the Louvre and knocked over a vase. Gendarmes everywhere, the whole city out and on high alert. It would’ve been the easiest thing for one of us to do the other in at such a moment, but you come to find out your honour won’t let you. So it’s off over the rooftops until you meet again in Tuscany or North Africa or the Sudan. I won’t say it’s the life I chose, but it wasn’t such a bad one, either.

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More movies:

• Adam’s Holiday Movie Recommendations 2025, Part One

• Adam’s Holiday Movie Recommendations 2025, Part Two

• Adam’s Holiday Movie Recommendations 2024

• Let’s All Go To The Movies…

• The Beasts (2022)

• The Teachers’ Lounge (2023), The Night Of (2016), and Les Sauvages (2019)

Announcement: I'll be editing the next issue of Saros, a new zine from Fusion Fragment. If you've got some sci-fi that fits our theme ("Breaking the Mold"), I hope you’ll consider sending it along. 1000—2500 words. Token pay. Also looking for essay pitches. Submissions will be open April 13—May 17, so you have time to write something from scratch, if you feel like submitting.

Full details here: https://sarossf.com/submissions/

As a sidenote, we opted for the sans ‘u’ spelling of mold. Canadian English, with its insistence on honour and colour, supposedly prefers the ‘u’ for both senses of the word, but the internet seems to be breaking that down, and mold without the ‘u’ just looks better to my eye (though I will always uphold colour and honour). Alas, the first graphics went out on social media with the ‘u’ intact. But rest assured it will be removed for the next go round.

Humberkin

I might’ve posted about the humberkin before, but a google search turned nothing up, and as it happens, it came up in conversation twice in recent weeks, so I want to share it again:

The rudiments of wreck law were widely known. When a ship ran aground on the deadly Goodwin Sands in Kent in the late 16th century, the crew tied their dog to the mast and abandoned ship; returning later, ‘finding the dog alive ... [they] had their ship and goods again.’ Seventeenth-century lawyers were at least as ingenious as sailors in straining the hard cases. Did it matter if the survivor was a man or a woman, or if the animal was wild or domesticated – what about the red deer that swam ashore from a wreck off Norfolk in 1705? Where did the shore begin anyway? The Admiralty asserted its claim to flotsam, jetsam and lagan, and its lawyers were salty with coastal folk who waded out too far to retrieve goods. Some villages maintained that their rights extended into the sea as far as a horse could stand, or where a man could reach with a long pole; others said it was ‘so far into the seas as they could from the shore discern a Humberkin’ – apparently a kind of floating barrel. But the Admiralty judge Sir Henry Marten complained in 1637 that this was ‘an old idle saying, no man living being able to tell us what such a barrel is’.

Link.

I don’t know, it’s just funny having a measurement where no one knows what it refers to. Like when you hear 19th-century Bible obsessives arguing over the measure of a cubit.

Birds over Baghdad

Here’s a very cool paper co-written by Sam Ottewill-Soulsby, whose book on Muslim-Christian relations in the age of Charlemagne I really enjoyed.

Abstract:

In the late ninth and early tenth centuries, an extraordinary number of falcons were given to the ʿAbbāsid caliphs in Baghdad, many of which were white. Gifts from competing dynasties in the northern provinces of the Caliphate, at least some of these birds were almost certainly gyrfalcons from near the Arctic Circle. This article argues that they came from Scandinavia and that their appearance in Baghdad can be linked to Norse settlement in Iceland. The journey of these gyrfalcons demonstrates the importance of access to northern goods for caliphal politics and the impact of scarce animal resources on early medieval trade.

Link.

Among other neat things, the paper has an aside about a fictional tale of a Tuscan embassy to Caliph al-Muktafī (r. 902–8), with gifts that include “‘three birds found in the land of the Franks’ that ‘utter detestable cries and flutter their wings’ to draw attention to poisoned food or drink, and ‘beads that painlessly extract arrowheads and spearheads’.”

Here are a few other neat bits about actual medieval falconry and related matters:

Archaeological evidence for medieval falcon-catching (in Scandinavia) is lacking, but more is available from the early modern period. There is, though, one eleventh-century Norwegian example from the island of Orta in Sandøy municipality, Møre og Romsdal – a small construction with peat walls, resembling a modern-day bird-watching hide. Its marshland location was well suited to catching raptors, including gyrfalcons, which often prey on waders. Another method of falcon-catching used nets baited with birds. The stone footings securing these nets would be the only part that might feasibly remain in the archaeological record.

…

A thirteenth-century Norse text, Konungs skuggsjá (‘The King’s Mirror’), associates white morphs specifically with Greenland. Intended to educate the son of the Norwegian king Hákon Hákonarson (d. 1263), the work has encyclopaedic sections. … The aforementioned Konungs skuggsjá description of the abundance of white falcons in Greenland noted that its inhabitants lacked the knowledge to use the birds themselves. There is indeed little evidence for falconry being practised in Greenland and Iceland, which seems likely to have been the result of the birds’ value for international trade, as well as the dearth of game, particularly mammals, available for hunting compared to continental Europe, the British-Irish Isles, and even Scandinavia itself. But it also speaks to the importance of the existence of a culture of falconry and falcon-catching. But ninth-century Scandinavia proper did have a culture of falconry and falcon-catching, providing them with precisely the expertise to acquire, use and sell them.

…

There is reason to believe that many of the gyrfalcons did not survive their journey. In his 1240s treatise on falconry, Emperor Frederick II noted that gyrfalcons were likely to arrive the worse for wear after a long journey and needed a season of rest to recover. It has been suggested that the birds, being adapted to a cold climate, can become ill when kept in conditions that are too warm for them. If this occurred, it may be that the effort expended on what proved to become sickly or short-lived birds had diminishing returns and might have contributed to the decline in the trade. However, in other instances the trade continued despite these challenges. In Mamluk Egypt it seems to have been common to pay for dead gyrfalcons to encourage merchants to continue this otherwise financially risky business.

This suggests a possible interpretation where the supply of gyrfalcons shrank rapidly due to over-exploitation by the early tenth century.

…

The gyrfalcons that arrived in Baghdad were an ultimately ephemeral phenomenon, leaving only a minimal trace in the sources, yet they offer a number of important points for modern scholars. The first is the significance for the Caliphate of links with the Scandinavian world. … Gyrfalcons were apparently prioritized for export rather than being used for falconry in Iceland and Norway. They were prestigious not just because of their size, colour and abilities, but also, in the context of the Caliphate, due to the very fact that they were so hard to obtain, so expensive to transport long distances, and so costly to maintain (given the previously mentioned expense of animal-keeping). That the timing of the falcon boom in Baghdad coincided with the first evidence of falconry in Norway (in the Gokstad burial) is intriguing. It is also tempting to connect it to the settlement of Iceland, which would make the western end of this exchange network about as far west as was possible in this period.

This reminds me I have a book of medieval Arab hunting poetry I’ve been meaning to read. And maybe I should do a post on Ibn Fadlan.

Tangentially, apparently March was the time for bird migrations in Iraq, and so large swarms of birds played havoc with American missile detection systems (those that remain intact), as they read the same as low altitude shahed drones.

I’ve been meaning to write something on the Iran war, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to try, yet.

Pepys in the News

The Guardian reports that Cambridge University historian Dr. Michael Edwards has found a letter in which Pepys turns is slave offered as a bribe. Pepys turned the offer down, mostly because he didn't want to be seen taking a bribe (Pepys was not opposed to bribes, or slavery, but there was a proper way to do these things, and he couldn't be seen to be openly profiting off the navy, although he made his fortune doing exactly this).

Pepys had a few contacts with the slave trade, mostly after the diary concludes. During the years of the diary, one of the neighbours he often fought with, Sir William Batten, had a Black African servant, so a slave, named Mingo, who Pepys sometimes wrote about in the diary. Mingo took part in a Valentine's Day jokes one year, and in another entry someone brings a parrot around and it remembers Mingo from earlier in its life (I think that the Battens bought the parrot but then sold it?).

I think there is a reckoning coming to the Pepys community, especially the parts of it that insist his life is something to be looked back on simply as a source of mirth, something only to be celebrated. But that’s not how history works. I think there’s a fear that Pepys will be ‘cancelled’ and we won’t be able to enjoy laughing at his antics anymore, but that’s not how history works, either. The forums I lurk on have a meltdown about this every few months, and it’s funny because it’s almost an exact replay of stuff you’ve seen on twitter a thousand times. You have to take the good with the bad. You can’t deny that Pepys’s diary is a real work of literature and an important historical document, surprisingly funny, honest, and full of self-reflection. But you also can’t deny that he had a small but real connection to the origins of one of the worst crimes of all time.

You can access Edwards’ paper here: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/f1b0b323-42cf-426f-b4ca-07060d6b1b61

I feel like I found some good art this week. Let me know in the comments which piece is your favourite.

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From Pepys’s journal, on March 26, 1663:

This day is five years since it pleased God to preserve me at my being cut of the stone, of which I bless God I am in all respects well. Only now and then upon taking cold I have some pain, but otherwise in very good health always. But I could not get my feast to be kept to-day as it used to be, because of my wife’s being ill and other disorders by my servants being out of order.

He’s referring to the removal of a bladder stone in 1658, a few years before he began his diary. Claire Tomalin, in her biography Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, gives a particularly harrowing account of the surgery:

Patients were advised to have the operation in the spring. Both cold and heat were considered unfavourable, and the surgeon hoped to have bright sunlight to help him to see what he was doing. Pepys duly settled on the end of March. The preparations took some time. The sick person was advised to cultivate a calm frame of mind and to avoid anger or sadness; he should feel confidence in the surgeon, even affection... And surgeons were encouraged to give their patients an honest account of what they were to undergo. Wine was not allowed during the preparatory weeks, only sweet drinks made from almond, cucumber and melon, and a diet of fresh meat, chicken, pigeon, eggs, butter, barley and water-gruel. In the days before the operation Pepys would have been given warm baths – possibly an unprecedented experience – and kept in a warm bed. His belly would be rubbed with unguents, he would be bled in the arm and given gentle purges, until the final day, when he was left in peace and simply served with a good meal.

The operation was performed in the patient’s bedroom. On the day of the surgery a lightly boiled egg was recommended, and a talk with a religious adviser. For Sam, whether he ate the egg or spoke with a clergyman, the day was 26 March. He had a last bath, was dried, told to take a turn or two about the room and offered a specially prescribed drink made of liquorice, marshmallow, cinnamon, milk, rosewater and the whites of fifteen eggs – six ounces to be swallowed with an ounce of syrup of althea and other herbs, a large dose for a nervous man to swallow. After this he was asked to position himself on a table, possibly covered with a straw-filled bag into which he could be settled while the process of binding him up began. Some surgeons thought it wise to say a few reassuring words at this point, because the binding was terrifying to many patients. They were trussed like chickens, their legs up, a web of long linen strips wound round legs, neck and arms that was intended to hold them still and keep their limbs out of the surgeon’s way. The instructions for the binding alone take up several pages of one manual; and when it was done the patient was further bound to the table. He was shaved around his privy parts, and a number of strong men were positioned to hold him fast: ‘two whereof may hold him by the knees, and feet, and two by the Arme-holes, and hands… The hands are also sometimes tyed to the knees, with a particular rowler, or the knees by themselves, by the help of a pulley fastened into the table.’ Meanwhile the surgeon lubricated his instruments with warm water and oil or milk of almonds: the catheter, the probe, the itinerarium, the specular, the pincers, small hooks and so forth; he also had powder to stop bleeding, sponges and cordial waters to hand. There were no anaesthetics, and alcohol was certainly not allowed to a patient undergoing surgery to the bladder.

The surgeon got to work. First he inserted a thin silver instrument, the itinerarium, through the penis into the bladder to help position the stone. Then he made the incision, about three inches long and a finger’s breadth from the line running between scrotum and anus, and into the neck of the bladder, or just below it. The patient’s face was sponged as the incision was made. The stone was sought, found and grasped with pincers; the more speedily it could be got out the better. Once out, the wound was not stitched – it was thought best to let it drain and cicatrize itself – but simply washed and covered with a dressing, or even kept open at first with a small roll of soft cloth known as a tent, dipped in egg white. A plaster of egg yolk, rose vinegar and anointing oils was then applied.

Pepys, no doubt by now fainting with shock and pain, was unbound and moved to his warmed bed. A cold syrup of lemon juice, radishes and marshmallow was ready for him to drink. The first dressing was left for twelve hours, and the thighs were kept tied to help the wound heal naturally. There was no question of getting out of bed for a week. Broth, cinnamon water and soothing drinks were given during the first day of recovery, and when he felt like something more an austere vegetable diet of succory (chicory), endive and spinach was recommended. There was further anointing of his belly with oils; oil of earthworms was held in readiness against possible convulsions, and a purge given if necessary, but only after two weeks. Fever, insomnia and pain were all to be expected, and above all, you would think, acute anxiety. Was the bladder healing? How soon might he expect it to function normally again? If he moved, would he tear the just healing wound open? Had the surgeon missed the prostate, something the manual worried about? Pepys was the type of patient who is likely to have read it for himself. We know that he sought information and anatomical explanations from the doctors who attended him, as he recalled when he saw a corpse dissected at the Surgeons’ Hall in 1663, and took a particular interest in the bladder and kidneys.

Recovery, for those who did not succumb to secondary infection, was expected to take thirty to forty days. Pepys made it in thirty-five. It was a triumph. By his own account he was himself again by 1 May.

…

Hollier (Pepys’s doctor) could be proud of his work, especially considering the size of Pepys’s stone, described as ‘very great’ by his medical colleagues; it was as big as a tennis ball, according to Evelyn, who saw it later. Real tennis, the only kind then played, uses very slightly smaller balls than modern lawn tennis, but still with a diameter of about 2¼inches; the stone must have been exceedingly awkward to get hold of and extract through a three-inch incision.

Pepys’s affluent cousin Jane Turner had always been something of a motherly figure to Pepys, and she helped nurse him back to health, and he always had a certain fondness for her due to that. She gets a lot of space in the diary, married a rich lawyer but lived apart from him, and when Pepys’s brother Tom’s died, she was at his deathbed.

Samuel Pepys had suffered from the stone for most of his life, and couldn’t remember a time before the surgery when he hadn’t been in pain. He saved up to have a special case built for the stone, which he enjoyed showing to guests, and planned on throwing a celebratory feast on every anniversary, though as seen above, he wasn’t always able to carry it out.

Elizabeth Pepys had her own health problems, which Tomalin diagnoses as “Bartholin’s abscess or cyst, a relatively common condition treated today with antibiotics and, if necessary, surgery.” But there was no cure or even effective treatment in her day. She and Sam both blamed him for passing it to her, thinking it was venereal, as she only started to experience pain after her wedding night.

Tomalin also offers this account from John Evelyn, another diarist living in Pepys’s London, who’d seen five such surgeries performed in Paris:

The sick creature was strip’d to his shirt, & bound armes & thighes to an high Chaire, 2 men holding his shoulders fast down: then the Chirurgion with a crooked Instrument prob’d til he hit on the stone, then without stirring the probe which had a small channell in it, for the Edge of the Lancet to run in, without wounding any other part, he made Incision thro the Scrotum about an Inch in length, then he put in his forefingers to get the stone as neere the orifice of the wound as he could, then with another Instrument like a Cranes neck he pull’d it out with incredible torture to the Patient, especially at his after raking so unmercifully up & downe the bladder with a 3rd Instrument, to find any other Stones that may possibly be left behind: The effusion of blood is greate. Then was the patient carried to bed, & dress’d with a silver pipe accommodated to the orifice for the urine to pass, when the wound is sowed up: The danger is feavor, & Gangreene, some Wounds never closing.

Surely Evelyn was wrong about the incision being through the scrotum? The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (1955).

More Pepys
January 1662: No more drinking, no more theatre
February 1662: Dancing mania, Valentine’s, arquebus headshot
March 1662: A leather submarine?
April 1662: Sneaking around on his wife
May 1662: Lustful nuns and a grim reminder
June 1662: Pirates, a scam, maggots, and voyeurism
July 1662: Why can’t the King command the rain?
August 1662: “I find myself a very rising man”
September 1662: Restoration Renovations; Or, Pranking Mr. Goodenough
October 1662: Clapped Up Quakers
November 1662: Treasure hunt!
December 1662: Another Christmas with Pepys
February 1663: Rake-shamed rogues!
The Strange Case of Mary Carleton

PS friend of the newsletter Ivy Grimes and Tiffany Morris both have new books out this week. You should check them out!

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I have lapsed in my reports from Pepys’s diary. You will forgive me, I hope. I’ve been busy and so has Pepys, but in neither case has it been very interesting. Truth be told, 1663 is relatively slow and uneventful, so I’m probably not going to have many Pepys posts this year, though we’ll still check in on him from time to time.

One fun thing did happen, back in February, on the 21st, Pepys was almost arrested, and spent a day hiding from the cops constables:

Towards noon there comes a man in as if upon ordinary business, and shows me a writ from the Exchequer, called a Commission of Rebellion, and tells me that I am his prisoner in Field’s business; which methought did strike me to the heart, to think that we could not sit in the middle of the King’s business. I told him how and where we were employed, and bid him have a care; and perceiving that we were busy, he said he would, and did withdraw for an hour: in which time Sir J. Minnes took coach and to Court, to see what he could do from thence; and our solicitor against Field came by chance and told me that he would go and satisfy the fees of the Court, and would end the business. So he went away about that, and I staid in my closett, till by and by the man and four more of his fellows came to know what I would do; I told them stay till I heard from the King or my Lord Chief Baron, to both whom I had now sent. With that they consulted, and told me that if I would promise to stay in the house they would go and refresh themselves, and come again, and know what answer I had: so they away, and I home to dinner, whither by chance comes Mr. Hawley and dined with me.

Before I had dined, the bayleys come back again with the constable, and at the office knock for me, but found me not there; and I hearing in what manner they were come, did forbear letting them know where I was; so they stood knocking and enquiring for me.

By and by at my parler-window comes Sir W. Batten’s Mungo, to tell me that his master and lady would have me come to their house through Sir J. Minnes’s lodgings, which I could not do; but, however, by ladders, did get over the pale between our yards, and so to their house, where I found them (as they have reason) to be much concerned for me, my lady especially.

The fellows staid in the yard swearing with one or two constables, and some time we locked them into the yard, and by and by let them out again, and so kept them all the afternoon, not letting them see me, or know where I was. One time I went up to the top of Sir W. Batten’s house, and out of one of their windows spoke to my wife out of one of ours; which methought, though I did it in mirth, yet I was sad to think what a sad thing it would be for me to be really in that condition.

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The Field’s business I’m not entirely on top of. He had Field arrested a year ago, and then there’s some sort of exchange where now Pepys now owes money to a commission? Pepys refers to the commissioners as a bunch of rake-shamed rogues, which is a great insult. Anyway, after the above passage, Pepys spends the day in hiding while his friends have the debts paid off.

When the matter is finally settled, Pepys’s allies take the opportunity to taunt their enemies, while Pepys goes for a walk to assure the neighbourhood that his honour is untouched:

But before they went, Sir W. Batten and my lady did begin to taunt them, but the rogues answered them as high as themselves, and swore they would come again, and called me rogue and rebel, and they would bring the sheriff and untile his house, before he should harbour a rebel in his house, and that they would be here again shortly.

Well, at last they went away, and I by advice took occasion to go abroad, and walked through the street to show myself among the neighbours, that they might not think worse than the business is.

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Hey folks, only a very short post today.

I was researching something earlier this week and came upon this description of Carnival/Lent celebrations in northern Italy and thought you’d enjoy:

For the present, we shall leave our discussion of Ferrarese tournaments until the final chapter, subject to one small but interesting point concerning the structural opposition of Carnival and Lent. Historians have long familiarized themselves with this opposition through the iconographic battles depicted by Bosch and Brueghel, of which Brueghel's magnificent Combat of Carnival and Lent has attracted special commentary. A fat man, capped by a pie and sitting astride a wine barrel, jousts with a haggard old woman seated on an upright chair: he (Carnival) is armed with a skewer for meat, she (Lent) with a baker’s pallet. Within the context of contemporary Shrovetide festivities, the literal meaning of the scene is plain enough, although the wider implications of the painting have meant an iconographic commemoration of the Christological cycle running between Christmas and Whitsun to Claude Gaignebet, and to Peter Burke, a representation of the attempt by clergy Catholic and Protestant to suppress or reform popular festivities at the time of the painting’s composition (1559). There is some evidence which suggests that Brueghel's combat drew inspiration from publicly enacted rituals. In Venice, for example, a pig was beheaded every year on Shrove Tuesday, in Madrid, alternatively, a herring was buried with ceremonial honours. Here is Peter Burke's synthesis of the closing stages of a "model" Carnival celebration: "The last act of the festival was often a drama in which 'Carnival' suffered a mock trial, made a mock confession and a mock testament, and was given a mock execution, usually by burning, and a mock funeral". In Bologna, during the Carnival of 1506, the jousting theme found vivid expression. A tournament was held in the piazza between "Carnival" mounted on an obese horse, and "Lent", mounted on an emaciated one, both figures commanding a squadron of knights. Equally poignant to the spectators must have been the Ferrarese tournament held on 4 February 1502 as an intermezzo during the performance of the Bacchides. A young girl, in the company of ten nude young men, is assailed by a Lenten dragon "ando per devorarla", but she is saved by a knight who upon defeating the monster, ‘Itlo prese, et, menandolo ligato, la giovene a brazo con un giovene lo seguitavalt.’ Following this, a young man, naked except for a pair of shoes which are worn upon his head, is scourged by ten boys dressed in white … the shoes are captured by the company and placed upon a horse to be carried in procession about the theatre (in the Palazzo della Ragione). For the time being, the rigours of the Lenten fast are postponed. Surely more significant, however, was the annual tournament held in the Piazza on Shrove Tuesday, the Spettacolo'del Porco. As Prosperi described the proceedings to Isabella d’Este, a tribunal was erected upon which a pig was loosed. Twelve familiars of the ducal household armed with clubs (bastoni) and protected by helmets and breast-plates, were blindfolded and led onto the stage. "Dato il segnale a suon di trombell,” the men moved forward to give combat, the object being-to club the animal to death and make off with the prize.

Source: THE POLITICS OF MAGNIFICENCE IN FERRARA 1450-1505: A Study in the Socio-Political Implications of Renaissance Spectacle by Richard Gordon Brown

I once attended a lecture about the painting where it was pointed out that the tree branches at the top left of the painting are bare, but on the right have leaves, and that this is a clue that the painting isn’t a snapshot in time, everything happening all at once, but a montage of the lenten season. I always liked that.

More from Adam’s Notes:

• Check Out This Guy I Found

• The Painted Room in Mantua

• Bembo’s Bad Boarder

• Bembo’s Other Bad Boarder

• The Necromancer of the Colosseum

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This is now an award-nominated newsletter. Fingers crossed, Eric, and congratulations!

You can read Eric’s essay here. It’s literally the only piece of content in this newsletter that I didn’t write myself.

There are some witty lines in the LRB’s takedown of Stephen Greenblatt’s new book on Christopher Marlowe. Here’s my favourite:

Given the ‘desire to speak with the dead’ to which Greenblatt hubristically admitted at the start of his follow-up to Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Shakespearean Negotiations (1988), it’s a shame that while writing Dark Renaissance he didn’t recognise more of himself in Faustus instead of pursuing these minor historical parallels. Faustus, after all, was an academic who set out subversively to stretch the boundaries of human knowledge, but wound up squandering his talents and his allotted time performing feats of necromancy in order to divert successive potentates even wealthier than the families of Greenblatt’s cohorts of Harvard students.

Link.

Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning is without a doubt the most important book of Renaissance scholarship in recent decades, and at this point it’s informed a whole generation of scholars, but I guess he’s coasting on this new one. A shame, I was planning on reading it.

It should be mentioned that Greenblatt, being a Harvard guy, has 22 hits to his name in the Epstein files, although nothing nefarious from what I can tell. At one point he organizes a seminar where Brian Boyd, a Nabokov scholar, is scheduled to speak, so naturally Epstein takes an interest, paying for the scholar’s hotel room.

Here is Greenblatt’s only direct correspondence with the Epstein crew. Boyd’s hotel room. More. And at one point it seems Greenblatt was booked to appear on Lawrence Krauss’ podcast, which was probably a crime against listeners, but not technically punishable by law.

The LRB piece on Greenblatt also gets in a good dig at Le Carré, who like Marlowe was an English spy-turned-author:

In his novels, the mature le Carré personified the agonised liberal conscience of his country, horrified at the successive betrayals forced on even those with its best interests and noblest aspirations at heart, but that doesn’t make us feel any less queasy when we learn that the young Cornwell’s earliest intelligence assignment was to join left-wing student societies at Oxford in order to provide information to MI5 about his fellow members.

As it happens, I just finished reading le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy, the direct sequel to Tinker, Tailor set partially in Hong Kong. It’ll be a while before I write about it here, though. In the meantime, here’s an interview with le Carré from around the time Honourable Schoolboy was first published. Not a whole lot new, but Melvyn Bragg— who recently retired from hosting one of my favourite podcasts, the BBC’s In Our Time—is a good interviewer, and I like the story about how the guy playing Control in one of the movies was an Irish actor who despised everything the Circus/MI6 stands for, and how that made him strive harder to nail the character.

I spent the better part of the weekend glued to my screen, watching the Epstein class make war on Iran. I don’t really have anything useful to add that hasn’t been said better elsewhere, so I thought I would instead share some of the people I follow on this who I think have valuable insight.

• . They’re good at doing what CBC’s As It Happens used to be good at doing: picking up the phone, calling someone close to a breaking story, and getting them on the record about it. Actual reporting, a rare thing in this day and age.

• The War Nerd. The only podcast worth paying for. Mark Ames and John Dolan are great at making sense of the world. I’m also a huge devotee of Dolan in general. I read his poetry collection People With Real Lives Don’t Need Landscapes earlier this year, and I’m looking forward to They Should Have Been Hanged, a recent collection of essays about the U.S. Civil War.

• Ali Abunimah. There were a bunch of livestreams this weekend where hosts would interview various guests knowledgable on the situation, and I caught Abunimah on a bunch of these. He has a certain moral clarity, which would make anyone else come off as preachy, but he has this way of harnessing it to cut through the bullshit and demystify things that I’ve appreciated for a while now. Abunimah is a director of Electronic Intifada, an organization that does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to keeping the world informed about Palestine.

• had a good piece this weekend about Trump's "you can just do things" approach to war. Lynch is worth following because she’s great on geopolitics, and at explaining the situation in countries that don’t normally make the headlines.

• ’s Foreign Exchanges is likewise good on geopolitics.

• ’s This Week in Northern Syria does exactly what it says on the tin.

• Ian Welsh. I believe Welsh is a Canadian blogger? I’ve been following him for a few years at this point. He says things straightforwardly and without the look-at-me embellishment that the freelance class needs in order to keep treading above water. His piece today was a rundown of the numbers. In short, Iran has more missiles than the Epstein class has interceptors, and the biggest threat to Iran right now is agreeing to a premature ceasefire and a round of bad faith negotiations, thus allowing USA and Israel to restock munitions and carry out another round of strikes nine months from now.

I’m sure there’s a bunch of stuff I’m missing. A lot of my readers won’t like to hear this, but X (née Twitter) remains the best source for news about Iran, and for big news events in general. You just have to curate a good following and ignore anyone trying to do discourse or engagement bait. Bluesky is mostly just content imported from twitter, Substack Notes is guys in their thirties bitching and moaning that they don’t have a book deal,1 and Instagram is just it’s own little world of content slop that doesn’t seem able to acknowledge anything outside of itself.

Thanks for reading to the end!

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There’s some ad playing on Youtube that keeps using that one song by The Killers, and I keep mishearing the line in my head as “Are we human/Or dare we answer?” Quite frankly, I think my version is better. More philosophical, with a hint of some kind of cosmic dread. WTF is “are we dancer” even supposed to mean? It’s stupid. Anyway, here are four books I’ve read recently, there’s no real theme, although two of them have the word blood in the title:

Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro
Translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus
Deep Vellum, 2025; 159 pages.

Eerie. Mesmerizing. Hypnotic.

A woman captain of an otherwise all male crew on a transatlantic cargo ship allows the crew to use their downtime to go swimming in the ocean. The roll call afterwards is disturbing: somehow they’ve picked up an extra crew member, and they can’t figure out who it is. From there, strange things begin to happen.

I understand that something like this shouldn’t have a straightforward explanation, but I still feel like a lack of closure kept this at good, instead of being great. Although that’s the nature of a haunting, isn’t it? That eerie feeling that something is left incomplete. I won’t ruin it by saying anything more. Don’t skip this extremely atmospheric novel.

The Blood Countess: Murder, Betrayal, and the Making of a Monster by Shelley Puhak
Bloomsbury, 2026; 304 pages

A book that uses the Bathory legend to jump into the history of Hungary. It's a complicated subject matter, without any familiar names or faces to help guide us along, but Puhak does a fantastic job of untangling the murky history and providing context. She has no time for the salacious and bloodthirsty legend, showing that there was no way it could be true (the girls’ school Bathory sponsored and was said to have preyed upon would’ve had to be wiped out completely three times over), and was instead a product of the campaign of slander carried out by her enemies. The problem is that the Bathory legend is fun, and a lot easier to understand than what actually happened.

Still, he geopolitics of 1600s Hungary ends up being interesting in its own way: you’ve got Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists all wary of each other, in a sort of permanent paranoia about the Ottomans at their doorstep. I really liked the stuff about the Hajduk, the bandits who haunt the hillsides and at one point are organized into an army.

Bathory comes off as a skilled administrator, adept at using the legal system to her advantage (until it all comes crashing down), and Puhak’s overall literary project seems to be to prove that a woman in this sort of role is not as uncommon as history would have us believe. The book was a great read, but if you haven’t read Puhak yet, I’d recommend starting with her earlier work Dark Queens, which is more accessible.

The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai
Translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett
New Directions, 2024; 73 pages.

A Japanese novel written in 1940, but only translated recently. Francois Villon—one of my favourite French rascals—gets mentioned in all the reviews, and there is a definite connection to him in the book, but think I set my hopes too high. It goes for a sort of madcap energy but doesn’t always get there, although it is funny at times.

So, a thirty-two year old writer drops off his latest manuscript in a mailbox, admitting it’s garbage and that he’s phoned it in. On his way home, he sees a boy in a river who he thinks is drowning, the boy turns out to be a high school dropout. They get into a sort of battle of wits, and he takes the kid to a nearby teahouse. The boy convinces him to take his place as a benshi, a narrator of a silent film. To do this, the narrator will need a school uniform, and they manage to borrow one from the novel’s third character, the boy’s former classmate. Obviously the uniform barely fits the adult novelist and there’s some humour wrung out of that. There’s a knife fight and drinking and eventually a cop stops them and asks what school they belong to—an obvious problem for our protagonist, who takes off running. The scenarios are clearly set up for humour, but didn’t quite work for me in their execution. Apparently it’s thought to be somewhat autobiographical, as wikipedia says the setting of the novel is where Dazai would attempt suicide for the fifth and final time in 1948. had an interview with the author that I thought was interesting, even though I didn’t really care for the book:

Counter Craft

Processing: How Sam Bett Translated Osamu Dazai

On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and the craft behind their books. You can find previous entries here. As a dedicated reader of translated literature, I’ve been meaning to expand this series into translation. And this week I’m excited to be talking with Sam Bett, translator of…

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a year ago · 62 likes · 4 comments · Lincoln Michel

Blood Bound: Unlacing Secret Ties by Marie-Josée Poisson
Translated from the French by Flora-Lee Bendit
Guernica Editions, 2026; 240 pages

Lou Ashby has it pretty good: she’s equally at home in the cities of Montreal and Paris, and she even knows her way around the more fashionable parts of rural Quebec. She’s very stylish, fashionable, and has a good job at the Montreal outlet of an international Francophone television company. Her best friend, a gay Labradorian dancer, is about to have a successful launch of a ballet project. There’s one problem: her last name isn’t Ashby, it’s Poisson, as in fish, and her extreme bully of a boss (an unfashionable feminist and separatist—boo! hiss!) uses that to humiliate her at a company dinner.

Soon she finds out she may have a connection to another famous Poisson: Madame de Pompadour, the chief mistress of King Louis XV, born Jeanne Antoinette Poisson. When a blood-soaked dress is recovered from the walls of the Élysée Palace (once Madame de Pompadour’s residence), Lou is unknowingly drawn into a mystery that will rewrite the history of 18th-century Paris and New France.

There’s a certain confidence to the prose that I really enjoyed, one that I feel used to be a bit more common, but was lost—maybe the recent trend towards more experimental fiction doesn’t allow it? I don’t know.

The book has received comparisons to The Da Vinci Code. There’s a similar premise, and our mystery here unfolds by learning about genealogy and costume studies the way Dan Brown used art history (I think but can’t say for sure that Blood Bound was first published in French at around the same time), yet I think a better comparison would be with Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series. Both Girl and Blood Bound have an obsession with what’s fashionable and what’s not, and both seem to involve their authors dreaming about a more fulfilling career.

Somehow, I was halfway through the book when I realized there was a third Poisson (a whole school of them, if you want a fish joke), this being the author, who, like Lou, is also a former Quebec television executive. So yes, I think there’s more than a bit of wish fulfillment in Blood Bound, but it’s of such an idiosyncratic nature that I couldn’t help but forgive it that—I was having too much fun. And besides, wish fulfillment was a big part of Stieg Larsson’s project, too, and you wouldn’t want it any other way.

More Books:

• A brilliant comic book and two war stories: Hobtown Mysteries, The Fort Bragg Cartel, and The German Prisoner

• 10 Things I Learned About the Bronze Age from The Horse, The Wheel, and Language

• Journeys to Renaissance Italy… And Yorkshire: Florenzer, Romola, The Throne, Perspective(s), A God in Need of Help, and The Gallows Pole

• Two sophisticated novels for adults, and one with dinosaurs: Audition, Good Will Come from the Sea, and Adam & Eve in Paradise

• Summer reading roundup: The Midnight Project by Christy Climenhage; Bodies of Summer by Martin Felipe Castagnet; The Wheelman by Duane Swierczynski

• Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour by Kate Beaton

• Eurotrash by Christian Kracht and Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico

• Command Performance by Jean Echenoz

• Permafrost by Eva Baltasar and The Private Lives of Trees by Alejandro Zamba

• A Small Town in Germany by John le Carré

• Satellite Image by Michelle Berry

• Fulgentius by César Aira

• Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon

• Awful People by Scott Mitchel May

• Fungal: Foraging in the Urban Forest by Ariel Gordon

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A family of moose wandered through the neighbourhood the other day:

Postbellum Jousting

I was reminded this week that for a time just after the American Civil War, newly freed Blacks took an interest in medieval chivalry, I presume by way of Walter Scott, who was beloved by the slave-owning class.

Abstract: The ring tournament is an American version of the medieval jousting tradition that had been reserved for the white wealthy planter elite in America for generations. After the Civil War it became an African American cultural practice, whose history has been all but lost to time. Immediately following emancipation, ex-slaves across the South began hosting and participating in ring tournaments through which they asserted their agency while harnessing the sport’s ability to empower the riders and their communities. The tournaments also influenced local politics and challenged power structures. In essence, the black tournaments became a symbol of freedom. The figure of a black man mounted on horseback wielding a dangerous lance, while magnificent in the eyes of African Americans and abolitionists, outraged many white tournament riders and intrigued spectators from every race and class. Nevertheless, black tournaments stamped an enduring impression on spectators across the South and the Union, as the events were reported on in the press nationwide. Even as the exConfederates in the New South grasped at the fragments of their shattered pride and its castle walls began to crumble, Black Knights and Black Queens rose as symbols of resistance that signaled imminent cultural shifts and power struggles in the South for generations to come.

Link to PDF. From Tilting Toward Freedom: African American Ring Tournaments in in a Postbellum South (2021) by Lauren S. Hanson and Carmen Harris.

I haven’t been able to find a whole lot more than this, just a few clickbait pieces, but I would love to read more. I can’t help but think it would make for a great novel: two worlds juxtaposed, one the world of knighthood as portrayed in nineteenth century literature (both idealistic but also admitting to the contradictions and fantastic nature of the dream, not so much Cervantes’ satire as Ariosto’s winking smile) and the other the Black struggle for freedom and dignity during Reconstruction. Alas, it’s not my story to tell, but I hope someone will tell it, someday.

Charles R. Saunders

The call to adventure came from a stranger in July 2020. It was a regular day in that plague year. Amid the mix of work emails came one from an address I didn’t know but with a subject line that immediately pulled me in: “Charles Saunders.”

Hi Jon, I am hoping you might know or know about the writer, Charles Saunders, who lives in Dartmouth, the message opened.

Reading his name conjured up strong images of the towering newspaper editor I’d worked with a decade ago. Built like a heavyweight boxer, but he moved like a cat. A genius with words and a wealth of writing wisdom, Charles was the senior editor on the Halifax Daily News and had written an iconic column on Black issues. The Daily News was a scrappy newspaper that broke a few noses in our city. Politicians feared us and regular folks cheered us.

I’d started working there as a night-shift copy editor in 2006. One colleague said working on the news rim was like doing your homework with friends late at night. We’d fall into a studious silence as we cleaned up the writing, checked the facts, and crafted the headlines, then burst into laughter when someone—occasionally Charles—made a pun too rude to publish but too delightful not to share.

Link.

This piece in is an excerpt of the new Charles Saunders biography. Saunders’ life intersected two of my niche interests, Nova Scotia journalism and Sword and Sorcery fiction. Saunders pioneered a subgenre he called Sword and Soul, where the setting is based on fantasy versions of historical African kingdoms, the way so much fantasy uses Europe. There’s a good essay somewhere where he writes about how he enjoyed the adventures of Tarzan novels when he was young, but as a Black kid in Pennsylvania, the racism and colonial attitudes of the stories kept him from getting fully onboard.

I thought about writing to him once circa 2019 when I learned that he lived in Nova Scotia (my understanding is the he came to Canada as a draft dodger, which some bios admit out of embarrassment, but which I think is pretty cool). I never did write to him and I really regret that. He died alone in his apartment and it was awhile before anyone found him. I look forward to reading Jon Tattrie’s biography.

The Literary Review of Canada has a piece on a new book calling for reform at the CBC. I used to listen to a lot of CBC Radio One, and I still listen once in a while, but it’s embarrassing how bad it’s got in the last few years. As such, I’ve been thinking a bit about what I would do I was in charge of fixing the Mother Corp:

• More news, fewer panelists. Pundits are like mushrooms, growing on dead institutions instead of fallen logs. Do real news, which means opening bureaus in small towns and overseas. The regional morning and afternoon shows are usually okay, but someone in Grand Prairie has to listen to the regional show out of Edmonton, and far flung rural audiences aren’t as captive as they used to be.

• We need more stuff in the vein of Frontburner, the only news program of recent years that really works. Partly it works because it avoids the format other news programs use. It’s a little more conversational in tone and it doesn’t try to cover twelve different topics in an hour. When the host apologizes for running out of time, which happens only occasionally, you don’t get the sense she’s breathing a sight of relief or suffering from PTSD, which is how a lot of other hosts come off, who all seem like they’re afraid of being yelled at. Maybe this is because Frontburnt is not front and centre at the CBC, you have to either to either seek out the podcast or wake up at five to hear an excerpt on the radio. More stuff like Frontburner and fewer flagship programmes makes it harder for reactionaries to target journalists and try to ruin their careers, which they love doing.

• Kill Cross Country Checkup. It turned Rex Murphy into a vampire, Duncan McCue left the CBC (I think?), and Ian Hanomansing seems like a nervous wreck whenever a contentious topic comes up.

• Still, there needs to be some way for the public to engage with the CBC and to have their opinions heard. I don’t have an answer, though. Obviously, allowing comments under articles didn’t work.

• Stop doing that thing where you pretend to interview an expert but then run two minutes of something pre-recorded to get their take on it. It’s number three on this list by . The Current is really bad for it and I immediately stop paying attention whenever I notice it happening.

• Land & Sea is by far the best thing the CBC has ever done, and the rest of the country deserves something similar (‘Rocks & Trees?’). I want to see an episode about the mushroom factory in Winnipeg. I want to find out what happens in Saskatoon.

• Fire Rosemary Barton. I’m not a Conservative, I don’t want to defund the CBC, but I can’t help but sympathize with Cons when they complain about her. People stopped trusting her when she took that selfie with Trudeau when he entered office in 2015, and it’s been downhill ever since. I don’t like throwing people out of work, but she’ll be fine. Probably end up in the senate.

• More historical context. We are a nation of goldfish-brained morons who have no idea what happened even ten years ago, let alone twenty or fifty. Most people have no context for anything that’s happening, or how our system of government differs from the American system as portrayed on TV. I mean, Danielle Smith thought she could pardon people like an American governor. You see this anytime something specific to the parliamentary system happens, as with recent floor crossings, where people supporting the losing party assume they’ve been cheated. There was actually a good Canadian Press piece on this recently that explained that since Confederation there have been over 300 floor crossings. I remember reading it and being mildly surprised, as I’ve never read a news piece offering that kind of context.

• Mark Fisher aka K-Punk (RIP) has an essay somewhere (I’m too lazy to look it up, I’m sure it’s in Capitalist Realism) where he wrote about how the BBC used to make film and documentary making accessible to anyone who wanted to try. That’s why the UK has an Adam Curtis and we don’t. Canada used to make great documentaries, and we should try doing that again. The National Film Board still does this, but maybe the CBC should move into that space. Give people training, equipment, internet hosting, etc. Give them some guidelines but don’t hold them to the same restrictive standards as reporters, and advertise and platform the stuff that comes out well. They’re sort of doing this with podcasts now, but only in a very limited way. Maybe they could also look to what public libraries are doing with podcast studios, etc.

  ---

My take: their motto is in Latin and their top priority is not letting women into the club. Possum Lodge is Catholic.

I should’ve got a picture of the street, this looks like a rural area, but it’s really not, and that’s only a very small strip of woods.

Thanks for reading to the end. Please let me know if you like my attempt at a Toozian Chartbook-style format and if you think I should keep at it.

More from Adam’s Notes:

• Adam Threeze’s Chartbook

• The Surveillance State is Listening

• Canadian connections I found in the Epstein files that no one else has reported on (Part two)

• Old Newspapers

• The Painted Room in Mantua

• Ekphrasis

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I like reading about the Spanish Civil War. The Popular Front was maybe the greatest single moment for the left, and its collapse can in many ways be traced to everything that’s gone wrong since. Last year I wrote a book review that tackled a new novel on the Spanish Civil War, and I’ve been meaning to dive back in and do something here, (maybe something on SpanishCivilWar.Ca, a project that looks at Canadian volunteers in the International Brigades), but keep putting it off.

One of my favourite books on the subject is Spain in Our Hearts by Adam Hochchild, which looks at American (and to a lesser extent, British and Canadian) involvement on both sides of the war. On the one hand, the working class of the anglophone countries sent thousands of volunteers to Spain to fight against fascism, and on the other side capitalist interests worked to prop up Franco’s regime with oil shipments and blocking the Republic’s access to Soviet weapons on the pretense of neutrality.

Anyway, here’s one of my favourite bits, something I come back to time and again, about the fighting at the University of Madrid:

Back in Madrid, where the battle continued on the university campus, British volunteers took over the job of clearing the hospital of Moorish troops, aided by the fact that some of the hungry Moors had poisoned themselves by eating rabbits, guinea pigs, and other laboratory animals injected with viruses for medical experiments. Shattered lab equipment littered the floors. In another campus building, other Internationals used elevators to dispatch bombs timed to explode when they reached floors held by the Nationalists. It was in this fighting at the university that the mobile blood unit of the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune gave its first transfusions, a landmark in military medicine.

Returning to their Philosophy and Letters headquarters, the Britons, including John Cornford, a great-grandson of Charles Darwin, set up sniping positions in the windows of a lecture hall, behind barriers that included the thickest books they could find: metaphysics texts, nineteenth-century German philosophy, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (In another building, French volunteers were sheltering behind parapets of Kant, Goethe, Voltaire, and Pascal.) A bullet, the British found, would penetrate an average of 350 pages before coming to a stop. In the building’s basement they discovered a large selection of books in English, and lugged copies of Thomas De Quincey, Charlotte Brontë, and others up four flights of stairs to their strongpoint to read during lulls in the fighting. The precocious Cornford had already won highest honors at Cambridge, published poetry, joined the Communist Party, fathered a child, separated from its mother and taken up with another woman, and seen combat with the POUM militia before joining the International Brigades. He would be killed in December, within a day of his twenty-first birthday.

I heard David Simon of The Wire was making a Spanish Civil War miniseries, I think adapting this book, but I haven’t heard any mention of it for a few year now.

Thanks to for putting this post on my radar, in which I learned that John Quincy Adams translated Huon de Bordeaux, Oberon, a poem by some German guy that attempts to tie the magickal faery king Oberon, who first appears in Huon of Bordeaux, to the later Oberon of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Huon of Bordeaux is one of my favourite chansons de geste. In Huon, Oberon’s a child of Morgan le Fay and Julius Caesar, and if I remember correctly, he uses a magickal horn to transport himself wherever he’s needed and to summon an enormous army. Maybe I’ll do a reading of it for my series on the chansons de geste.

I watched Nirvanna the Band the Show for the first time over the weekend, and now I’m stoked for the movie and have the above song stuck in my head.

Article: Death isn’t the end: Meta patented an AI that lets you keep posting from beyond the grave. “Meta was granted a patent that would use AI to train a bot to keep post-mortem accounts active.”

If you’re anything like me, you’ve been seeing articles like this for a few years now and just rolling your eyes. AI ghosts of real people don’t even rise to the level of creepy, it’s just poor taste internet slop aimed at the most gullible people online, so of course facebook keeps pursuing this.

I figured it's their money to lose, and I didn’t give it much more though than that. But I saw a post recently that made sense of it and it’s more than a little worrisome: AI ghost accounts can act as a sort of bluff to paper over political arrests or massacres. They’ll be the digital equivalent of fake shipping news during the war, trying to convince you that your cousin wasn’t ventilated by ICE or lost in an internment camp, he’s just going on a trip this Thanksgiving instead of coming home. Very worrying.

Sorry the newsletter is a bit late and a bit short. It’s been cold out and that keeps me from being productive.

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A belated Valentine’s Day poem:

Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri entio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why I do this, perhaps you ask.
I do not know, but I feel it being done and I am tormented.

I really like some of Matthew Nisinson’s interpretations in the Los Angeles Review. Here’s one:

HATE! LOVE! I’m full of both! Why would you ask why?
Neither of us knows. But I can tell you it sucks!

The poem is Catullus 85. I don’t spend a whole lot of time in the ancient world, but I try to read at least one book on the ancient world a year. Last year it was Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet by Daisy Dunn. Ignore the subtitle, that’s just to draw in the rubes. I was already familiar with Catullus’s poems, but this really helped me wrap my head around his life. Curiously, Dunn’s book was blurbed by noted oaf Boris Johnson. Must’ve been the subtitle.

Anyway, this year I’m hoping to tackle Ovid. I’m feeling ambitious, and want to read a biography, a historical fiction novel that I stumbled onto, and, of course, a bit of his actual writing. I won’t be getting to any of it until at least the summer, though.

I’m going to write about The Secret Agent (2025) in my next film roundup. In the meantime, here’s director Kleber Mendonça Filho telling Noah Kulwin about how in Recife, Brazil in the 70s (the setting of the film) people stopped going in the water for fear of sharks:

It looks amazing. But, I can’t go in the water because there is the fear that I might lose a leg or an arm, like so many people have. It’s like a curse. It’s the irony of ironies, and it has become who we are. In the ‘90s, when only surfers were being attacked, even myself, I would say, “Well, I’m not a surfer, so I’ll be alright.” And then other people began to get attacked.

NK: I suppose that Martin Niemöller poem about Nazis also applies to sharks. “First they came for the surfers, and I did not complain because I wasn’t a surfer…”

KMF: Exactly. You go, “I’m not a surfer.” Then, the second wave was people who would swim very far. I don’t swim far. Then, the conversation ended when this trucker from Santa Catarina was attacked at about one or two feet of water. He had half his leg taken. So, you know, we started behaving.

Link

Here’s a great review of two new history books, one on Early Modern postal systems and one on Early Modern news. Postal Intelligence: The Tassis Family and Communications Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Rachel Midura (2025) has been on my radar for a minute now. It’s possible that it holds the answer to something I’ve been wondering about for a while now. Think I’ll need to track it down.

A couple of neat bits from the review:

Information in the early modern world could move no faster than the bodies that carried it. A horse transporting mail between Tassis relay stations in 1425 travelled at just under 15 kilometres per hour. At that speed, between a trot and a gallop, a horse could keep going for about an hour and a half before the risk of overheating and damaging its spleen became critical. Carrier pigeons clocked in at about 25 km per hour. Despite these limitations, information flows were accelerating. For those who lived in London around the middle of the 17th century, it would take six days for news to arrive from Edinburgh, eleven from Paris, 28 from Venice and 44 from Lisbon. Things were speeding up because the systems were smoother – better roads, more direct connections, relay systems timed to cut out lag and better protection for the couriers. The dispatch notes signed when a delivery left a relay station and the rider receipts filled out when a courier arrived allowed postmasters to identify delay and disruption, and to pinpoint the blame.

…

Information moved fast, but not with total freedom. In a Europe divided by religion and scarred by war, surveillance of the posts was inevitable, and one way that postal officials secured their supremacy was by making a devil’s bargain with the rulers who contracted them: let us build you an efficient postal service and run it on your behalf, and we’ll help you monitor the information that travels through it. This was the era of black chambers – shadow post offices in cities such as Brussels, Vienna and Paris in which letters were secretly opened and read. The wax seal, which should have guaranteed that a letter remained unopened, could be moulded using mercury, melted with steam and then remade after the letter had been read. Some letter-writers fought back: the technique known as letterlocking allowed paper to be folded in ways that made it impossible to open without leaving evidence of tampering. In fact, letter-writers expected to have their correspondence read. One 17th-century French correspondent directly addressed the person she imagined secretly reading her letters, with a sardonic request that they at least put them back in their envelopes before sending them on their way. Others reminded their correspondents to keep schtum on topics that might draw the eye of a Tassis interceptor. Midura concludes that ‘systematic signals intelligence was well underway long before the 18th century,’ when it becomes more apparent in surviving archives: from the early years of the new system, private mail was rarely private in practice.

Link.

I’ve been having trouble concentrating lately, which either leads to or is caused by spending too much time on social media.

I’ll do good at moderating my social media use for a while but then some news story drags me back in. In the words of David Guetta: the world is going through difficult times, and America too actually.

If you have any advice for avoiding social media and rebuilding your attention span, I’d love to hear from you.

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The most vindicated man in China:

Thanks for reading to the end. This is part of my new series of Chartbook-style post. Let me know if you like it.

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Saxon Identities, AD 150-900 by Robert Flierman
Bloomsbury Academic, 2017; 288 pages.

You remember that thing Trump used to do where he’d just accuse all crime of being perpetrated by MS-13? Well, for a while the Romans used to do the same thing, calling all coastal raiders Saxons.

This book looks at ancient and early medieval Saxon ethnic identity formation through four groups of writings about the Saxons: from the Romans, from the Franks (Merovingian and Carolingian), and lastly from the Saxons themselves. There’s a great bit in the intro about how ethnic identity formation is not nearly as straightforward an idea as it was one hundred years ago, and about all we can agree on now is that ethnicity means self-identification plus “the belief that ethnic identification is not a deliberate choice, but the result of certain ‘deep structures.’”

The Romans used Saxons in panegyric speeches essentially as noble savages, sent by the Christian god to punish humanity for their sins or to test an emperor. According to Flierman, the Merovingians don’t ‘other’ the Saxons, seeing them as neighbours fully intertwined with Frankish affairs. But it’s the Carolingian perception of the Saxons the might be most interesting, because they spent 33 years campaigning in Saxony and bringing the Saxons under Frankish domination and into Christendom, so Carolingian writers both had to justify this invasion as well as explain why it was taking so long.

As the author explains, Charlemagne beat the Saxons essentially by creating them. They kept slipping from Frankish grasp because they weren’t a unified people but a broad group of tribes. So when one leader surrenders, the others would rebel. Although there were some cool battles and horrific war crimes like the Massacre of Verden (an execution of 4500 Saxons), Charlemagne got his best results by co-opting their ruling class, which involved granting privileges, generally bishoprics, monasteries, and counties.

This co-option leads to the first written accounts of Saxon self-perception. They saw themselves as Frank-like because they were being educated and ruled by the the Franks, but they were still their own people. Early Saxon writers acknowledged Charlemagne’s conquest but explained away the defeat by thinking of it in religious terms, with Charlemagne as a missionary delivering them from paganism. As the author writes,

They actively reworked the Frankish discourse so as to make it more acceptable for a Saxon audience. In Saxon hagiography, the Saxons were transformed from a gens perfidia to a gens nobilis. The length of the Saxon Wars became a sign of Saxon military valour as well as an indication of Saxon steadfastness and loyalty to ancient customs. The humiliation of defeat was mitigated by interpreting this defeat as part of a divine plan.

I would’ve liked to see a bit more on Widukin and the Irminsul, but there’s really just not a whole lot on them available from historical writings.

All in all, a fascinating book.

More from Adam’s Notes:

• One Weird Naming Convention of Milan’s Medium Elite Families

• Shelley Puhak’s Dark Queens

• Matt Holder’s Hurled Headlong Flaming

• Getting drunk and stupid with the Paladins of France: Le Pèlerinage de Charlemagne

• Enter the world of Ettare

• Bryn Hammond’s Waste Flowers

• Graham Thomas Wilcox’s Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy

• Fulgentius, César Aira’s Roman general and playwright

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A few odds and ends on Canadian links in the Epstein files before we resume regular programming.

There’s one hit in the Epstein files for Inter-Ocean Insurance, a company with a whole web of entanglements in the Paradise Papers. Nova Scotia premiere Tim Houston was named in the Papers as VP or director for Inter-Ocean Credit Products, Inter-Ocean Reinsurance, Inter-Ocean Holdings, and Inter-Ocean Services. That said, the hit in the Epstein files is only for a flyer advertising a number of companies that offer hull insurance in the Virgin Islands.

A bit more on the invitation John Baird sent to Epstein

It’s been reported elsewhere that Harper-era Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird’s name appeared on an invitation from the Salzburg Forum that was sent to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein inviting him to a 2014 seminar. The invitation was also signed by Baird’s Norwegian counterpart, the president of the Salzburg Forum, and Terje Rød-Larsen (Norwegian diplomat and former president of the International Peace Institute; searches for Terje in the Epstein files generate 9379 hits). Baird has since put out a statement saying he wasn’t consulted on the invite.

What I haven’t seen reported elsewhere is that Andrea Pfanzelter, a director for the International Peace Institute with 340 hits to her name in the Epstein documents, applied for funds from the Canadian federal government (duplicated here), specifically to the Global Peace and Security Fund (GPSF). Note that the box is checked stating that the organization has previously received funds. The ask was for 181,750 Euros, with another half a million claimed to be coming from other sources. The project was called “1814, 1914: Lessons of the Past, Visions of the Future,” and was to take place during the Salzburg Forum, as well as a number of one-day events in Austria, Canada, India, Bahrain and the UK (I don’t know if those other events ever took place, but I haven’t looked very hard). The application claims that noted Canadian historian Margaret Macmillan1 and Lise Frechette were committed to attending. GPSF is run by Global Affairs Canada, and thus in 2014 would’ve ultimately been overseen by John Baird.

In this e-mail, we see that Pfanzelter sent the application to Richard Dutka at Global Affairs and copied in Terje, who then forwarded the application to Jeffrey Epstein. Pfanzelter was unsure about the IPI’s previous funding from Canada.

Here’s a pamphlet about the seminar from the Salzburg Forum’s website that confirms Baird’s participation and thanks the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for their generous support.

What was Epstein’s interest in the Salzburg forum and the IPI? In the application for funding? I went through every mention of the IPI’s David Witt searching for something that wasn’t there, and it’s striking how involved Epstein is in the running of the organization—Wiki says he also threatened someone on behalf of Terje, there’s definitely a lot more to be uncovered there.

Baird is in the Epstein files again about a month later, attending a dinner hosted by Canadian billionaire Mort Zuckerman. Also attending: a number of ministers of foreign affairs from across Europe, plus Ehud Barack, Kevin Rudd (who also attended Salzburg and sat on the IPI’s board for a while), a CEO, and a member of the Arab League. Co-host Terje made sure to send the guest list to Epstein.

There’s are whole flurries of Epstein Network organizing around the Salzburg Forum in other years (particularly 2018)—but no other Canadian connection, as far as I can tell.

There were always rumours around Baird, and I now can’t help but think of that first season of Le Bureau where Nadia El Mansour uses a seminar in Paris as cover for more clandestine activities.

Michael Ignatieff:

Terj: May I also suggest that you invite Leon to join us for a coffee sometime this week, so that I can give him a briefing on developments in Austria. As you have noticed my good friend Sebastian Kurz (31 years old!) was elected chancellor of Austria and will form his cabinet shortly. I’ve been SMSing with him over the last week, and I think we are now in an extraordinary position to assist CEU in a move from Budapest to Vienna. I also have some excellent updates on the situation in the highest level in Hungary. I’m having lunch with Michael Ignatieff, the president of the university, in London next weekend.

[a few days later]

Terj: [redacted] deal is on the way. You will win the bet with Leon. Think I will get a good deal with the President if the University. Just finished now. He came straight from George, and what you said was spot on! He will never, ever go for Leon’s proposal. Good news is that what I am asking for looks like pocket money compared with what Leon wants. Thanks!!!!

Ignatieff served as President and Rector of Central European University between 2016 and 2021, when the institution was chased out of Hungary by Orban and relocated to Vienna. The text message exchange is from 2017.

Link

Yesterday, I wrote about Tony Clement’s flight in Epstein’s helicopter. Today I thought to check his twitter feed, which confirms that he was in Florida with his son, and fills out the picture a little.

On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 7:32 AM, Sultan Bin Sulayem < [redacted]> wrote:

Epstein then asked if they could meet in Florida instead of Vancouver, presumably because he knew he’d have problems getting into Canada.

Link

We will now resume regular programming. I’m still trawling through the files, following a number of trails, and there’s one Canadian connection in particular that I think is going to pay off. But I need a break because a) it’s eating too much into my time, and b) there are certain things in the documents that are just very demoralizing to stumble upon, and I don’t think it’s good for my overall mental health to spend my free hours scrolling through the detritus left behind by a vampire.

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“The CBC Reporter”

To catch up: someone at CBC Edmonton was very friendly with Epstein in 2009, emailing him while he was serving out his first prison sentence, the one that was an unprecedented slap on the wrist, where he was allowed home at night, etc. The Edmontonian had recently visited the British Virgin Islands (but hadn’t known about Epstein’s island until they returned home and googled it), and had a documentary out. In a later exchange, they invited Epstein to attend a fundraising event for Edmonton charities. He did not attend. The relevant documents are here and here. This exchange is almost certainly the same person. Internet sleuths pretty quickly decided it was a reporter who died in 2024, and I’m pretty sure that’s correct.

This one really got under my skin, I guess because I listen to a fair amount of CBC Radio One out of Edmonton. I decided to keep looking into it and I’ve since found out a bit more that I haven’t seen reported elsewhere yet, but it’s also more than a bit circumstantial.

Right now, I’m pretty sure:

• The reporter left the CBC within a few days of sending the invitation to Epstein, which suggests someone at the CBC recognized Epstein’s name and correctly decided that inviting a convicted pedophile to a children’s benefit is a fireable offence.

• After leaving the CBC, the reporter stayed in touch with Epstein and even took multiple trips to the States on Epstein’s dime.

I’ve built out a whole timeline that I’m pretty sure is correct, and I have a few ideas about what the reporter’s relationship was to Epstein, but I feel kind of uncomfortable posting it right now, just on the off chance I’m wrong about the reporter’s identity. Hopefully someone at the CBC is looking into this.

What was Tony Clement doing in Epstein’s helicopter?

Check out the flight log I found on page 25 of this doc. The same document can be found again in dataset 10. The flight took place on May 15, 2010, while Clement was Minister of Industry in the Harper government. Searching for Schmitka Air generates 191 results in the Epstein files, and misspellings add a few more. The ownership of the planes and helicopters in the Epstein files is murky, deliberately so. It’s possible Clement didn’t know who owned the helicopter, but it looks like the pilot did.

The day before the flight there’s an email sent to Epstein from someone named Larry (last name redacted but presumably the helicopter’s pilot, Larry Viskoski, per the flight log). The email asks Epstein about:

Jeff Pino and Cary Bonds wanting to give the Canadian Minister of Canada and his son a ride in your S76, for 45min. Bonds and Pino are the presidents of Sikorsky, and will also go on the flight. Is this a go or NO go? Flight would be tomorrow in palm beach at 2pm

Epstein replies: go

According to the flight log, the ride only lasted 18 minutes.

I don’t know about the Parliamentary ethics of accepting the ride, and I haven’t yet figured out what Clement was doing in Palm Beach, Florida. It’s unclear from the two documents whether he met Epstein.

It’s also important to note there’s no indication of any sexual impropriety on Clement’s part, which almost feels surprising, given the 2018 story about two men from the Ivory Coast who attempted to blackmail Clement by posing as a woman online and demanding 50,000 Euros after Clement shared explicit sexual images with them. Clement resigned in disgrace, with Conservative leader Andrew Scheer commenting at the time that it was “not an isolated incident.”

A British-Canadian Businessman with Ties to a BC White Supremacist?

This 2010 document looks like the sort of faxlore/chainletter email that’s since been replaced by the image macro or meme format.

Bernie Klatt might be:

a former Canadian internet service provider who ran what has been called "Canada's most notorious source of hate propaganda.”

While Jonathon E Lyons is surely the:

British-Canadian businessman and… owner and chairman of JE London Properties.

Why is Klatt sending a jokey (yet unfunny) email to Lyons? How do the two know each other? Why does Klatt have City of Calgary boilerplate at the bottom of his email—is it an artifact from the email being passed onto him, or was he employed by the city?

Klatt appears nowhere else in the files, while “Jonathan E. Lyons” shows up 21 times, generally sending or receiving copy-and-pasted jokes in a chain that tends to involve Epstein and Jonathan Farkas.

Canadian Billionaires

I haven’t seen these reported anywhere yet. To find them I simply went to wiki pages like “List of Canadian billionaires” and “Richest Canadian families” and pasted the names into the search. I feel like there’s more to be found on this front (I’ve had particular trouble searching for the Thomson family, because their Thomson Reuters news produces so many results).

Peter Munk: The first instance is perhaps negligible, Munk delivers a signed book from Peter Mandelson to Ivan Glasenberg of Glencoe Mining. Munk was trying to buy Glencoe at the time, but I don’t think the deal went through. Still, I wonder how Munk knew Mandelson. The second instance might be something for journalists to look into: Epstein approves of using “Africa Barrick chair” as a stepping stone sinecure for someone his crew wants to promote.

Robert Friedland: Someone reports that they're in Abu Dhabi with Robert Friedland, presumably the Canadian mining billionaire, and asks Epstein for advice on how to have fun. Link. Fun fact: In 1970, Friedland was caught selling LSD packs, thought to be worth $125,000, to an FBI agent. Later, “Toxic Bob” fled the U.S. over the Summitville Mine Disaster.

Lawrence Stroll: Epstein thought the Montreal billionaire had tax problems that kept him from entering the states. Link. Ghislane Maxwell invited him to an event with Leon Black & models. Link. Epstein sent him a fedex package. Link.

Jeffrey Skoll: On March 31, 2012, David Stern wrote to Epstein: “[A sentence length redaction] = Skoll will be in Istanbul. Will introduce you”, followed by the text of this article. The justice department website then has 93 hits for Jeff Skolls, and it’s beyond my ability to untangle them further. Skoll was an early ebay guy who then became an investor and movie producer, and his relationship with Epstein has already been the subject of some reporting.

The Food and Beverage Mystery

It’s been suggested to me that Epstein calling himself a “food and beverage man” is a reference to Scorsese’s Casino, but I feel like a) Epstein isn’t smart enough for that, and b) there has to be more to it. If you have any thoughts, please let me know.

Other Canadians I’ve found in the Epstein files: Tyler Brûlé (journalist and founder of Monocle24; he was a confirmed guest for a gossipy dinner party where Epstein hoped to spin a story to the FT), Ben Mulroney (Epstein/Yahoo are pitched on investing in Hubub, a social media platform(?) that Ben was spokesman for; Mulroney is laughably referred to as “one of the most widely-admired celebrities in Canada,” I haven’t been able to find anything on what happened to Hubub). Lindsay Borthwick, a freelancer who comes off as a bit prim but she’s just Canadian, has 305 results to her name; if anything, she really comes off as sycophantic as she applies to Epstein for some kind of job on the recommendation of Adam Bly. Bly has a whopping 1720 hits to his name, I don’t even know where to start.

Absolved?: I looked up the Kevin O’Leary of jetinvestors.com who is mentioned in the buying or selling of a plane. Turns out it’s not the Dragon’s Den/Shark Tank/Marty Supreme Star, but another guy with the same name. I hear the Canadian Kevin O’Leary prefers to travel by boat.

More from Adam’s Notes:

• Adam Threeze’s Chartbook

• The surveillance state is listening

• “I find myself a very rising man”

• At the Trough with Laurent Carbonneau

• A few scattered thoughts on the elections

• Can Liberal Candidate Evan Solomon Cross the Distance?

• One Weird Naming Convention of Milan’s Medium Elite Families

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Let me tell you about a weird guy I found recently.

Teseo Ambrogio degli Albonesi (1469—1540) was an Italian humanist who studied in in Pavia, abandoning a legal career to become a priest in the Augustinian order. Around 1515, in Rome, he was put in touch with a group of Lebanese priests and tasked with investigating the Catholic orthodoxy of the Maronites, a job he was well-suited for given his proficiency for languages—some accounts have him speaking as many as eighteen different tongues. He didn’t speak Syriac but he picked it up quickly thanks to his prior knowledge of Hebrew, which he’d learned from tutors in Rome’s Jewish community, including the son of Pope Julius II’s personal doctor.

He also had extensive contact with the monks of Rome’s Ethiopian community, and learned their language as well.

Eventually he left Rome for Pavia, working towards publishing a translation of the Chaldean Psalter he’d brought with him. It was laborious, painstaking work. More than just writing the book, he had to design and create multiple new typefaces. His work was interrupted by the Sack of Pavia in October 1527, which left 15,000 dead—a real massacre, but overshadowed in history by the much bigger Sack of Rome in May of that year, which left maybe 45,000 dead. Teseo either fled to Ravenna or happened to be out of town when the sack happened. He was lucky to be alive, but he’d lost the manuscript he was working on, his life’s work.

For a time, he gave up on his scholarship and focused on his priestly duties. He must have felt despair. All that work, gone.

In 1534 he was in the city of Ferrara, visiting his uncle Afranio and giving lessons on oriental languages, including Armenian, which he had recently picked up. One day he was at a butcher’s shop and noticed that the paper his meat was wrapped in was from his old manuscript! What luck! He must have felt Fortune’s hand spinning her wheel in his favour. With financial help from his uncle, he was able to reestablish his printing press, though a promotion forced him to relocate once more to Pavia.

His book, which he dedicated to his uncle, had the rather long title Introductio in Chaldaicam linguam, Syriacam, atque Armenicam et decem alias linguas. Characterum differentium Alphabeta circiter quadraginta et eorundem invicem conformatio. Mystica et cabalistica quamplurima scitu digna. Et descriptio et simulachrum Phagoti Afranii. Theseo Ambrosio ex Comitibus Albonesii I. V. Doct. Papien. Canonico Regulari Lateranensi ac Sancti Petri in Cælo Aureo Papiæ Præposito Auctore1. The book was among the first western studies of these languages, but it was also kind of a disorganized mess. It contains some of the first reproductions of the various alphabets he was studying, but it also has some alphabets that are just completely made up, that he sourced from cabalistic and magical writings (he claims to have the alphabet of the devil and of the angel Raphael). But the really funny part, to me, is that the book is mostly remembered today by music historians for a long digression which describes a musical instrument called a phagotus, which was invented by his uncle. Evidently it was a sort of early bagpipe.

I’ll be back this weekend with a post summing up what I’ve found in the Epstein files, focusing on Canadian connections. I have found a few small but interesting things I haven’t seen reported elsewhere yet, but I feel like there’s a bit more to the thread and I want to give myself a few more days to see if I can tease the out.

BTW, if you liked this post, check out ’s Medieval Italian People. I got the idea for this from the biographies she writes, which I always look forward to.

More from Adam’s Notes:

• The Painted Room in Mantua

• Bembo’s Bad Boarder

• Bembo’s Other Bad Boarder

• The Necromancer of the Colosseum

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