One year of Adam's Notes
Well, a year and a bit. I forgot the anniversary was last month.
My review of Ferdia Lennon’s debut novel Glorious Exploits has just been published over at the Exacting Clam. The novel is set in ancient Sicily, after the failed Athenian invasion, and it follows an unemployed potter who gets roped into using the defeated soldiers (who are now captives slowly starving to death in a limestone quarry) to put on a production of Euripides’ Medea. I definitely recommend this novel, in particular I really liked how it used working-class camaraderie as a gateway to exploring the ancient world.
Fellow War Nerd fans will be familiar with the setting from episode 151, "Ancient Athens' Disastrous Sicily Expedition, 415 BC," with guest Philip Matyszak. In fact, the whole reason I picked the book up in the first place is because I really enjoyed that episode, as well as Matyszak's book Expedition to Disaster: The Athenian Mission to Sicily 415 BC.
This marks the third book review I’ve had published over the summer (the others are here and here), with two more due out in September, and a few more I’m still working on. I’m not saying they’re anything smart or fancy, but I enjoyed working on all of them. I like the thought that maybe I’m able to direct people towards interesting things once in a while. And I only did it because I realized I’ve been writing this newsletter for a full year (I think the one year mark was sometime last month), and that gave me a bit of confidence to try.
Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me to know that I’m not broadcasting these words out into the void. It’s fun to write and I have no intention of monetizing this newsletter anytime soon. But that said (and I know this is lame) if you enjoy the newsletter, can I ask you to share the newsletter? You don’t have to broadcast it across your social media if you don’t want to, I get how annoying that is. But if there’s someone in your life who you think might enjoy this newsletter, do you think you could mention it to them? It would mean a lot to me.
This week I’ve been reading Nothing Left to Fear From Hell by Alan Warner and The Earth by Émile Zola. Warner’s novel is part of the Darkland Tales series from Polygon, a series of novellas by today’s best Scottish writers examining critical moments in Scotland’s myth and history. This one is about Charles Edward Stuart aka the Bonnie Prince, and his time as a fugitive in Scotland after the crushing of the Jacobite Cause at the Battle of Culloden. The Earth is the fifteenth novel in Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series, about a rural farming community in France. I decided to pick the series up again after that great essay by
Taylor in the LRB. Both books offer incredibly grim depictions of rural life just before the advent of industrialization. Nothing Left to Fear From Hell really perfectly captures what an awful feeling it is to be stuck outside in the cold wearing wet clothes. And there’s a family in The Earth who don’t have enough farm animals to fertilize their fields, so they collect horse manure from the road and then eventually stoop to manuring the fields themselves. They grow the biggest carrots in town, but when word gets out, no one will buy them. Like I said, grim stuff.
Links
Children's drawings made in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War found last year in a box.
“The Coat” is a great short story by Sheldon Birnie that somehow has an absurd premise but somehow evokes a real emotion. I really enjoyed it and I hope you will too.
Eric Williams goes on another pulp journey, this time into the world of Theodore Sturgeon, who for me is one of those big SFF names where you hear more about their biography than their writing, so I really appreciated this dive into one of his stories. Williams writes that “The World Well Lost” is, “Meditative, sad, but still a bit hopeful. The virulence of homophobia is really well portrayed… It’s very easy to dismiss these magazines as cheap and disposable entertainment (nevermind the fact that 35 cents in ’53 wasn’t exactly nothin’) but there’s more to them than trashy ray-gun stories. Because of their marginality, marginal writers could (and sometimes did) find homes for stories in them that otherwise might never have seen the light of day.”
Something serious: here’s a piece by Sally Hayden on the kidnapping, extortion, and murder of refugees in the Mediterranean. One of the traffickers named in the report seems to have been assassinated the day after the Hayden’s piece was published. She also has a great recent piece on hunger as a weapon in Sudan. I’ve been following Hayden’s reporting for a while now, ever since I read her book My Fourth Time, We Drowned. The book is about how, in 2018, she started receiving social media messages from refugees who had been abandoned in a jail in Libya. They were asking her for help because they, too, had been following her reporting. The refugee crisis infuriates me. We’re literally in the end stages of rendering huge swathes of the planet uninhabitable, and waging war on anyone who dares to leave and seek refuge here. Sometimes I think about, like, volunteering with an org that helps refugees or something, but the book is a big takedown of a lot of those groups, and I don’t even know where I would start.
The Florentine effort to promote male heterosexual activity through legal prostitution backfired when women in the brothel found that their business improved if they themselves dressed up as men.
— from another book I’ve been reading lately, Ladies Errant: Wayward Women and Social Order in Early Modern Italy by Deanna Shemek
Heist watch
$134,000 Worth of Historic Firearms Stolen from Museum in Robbery Downunda.
The story of an unsolved bank robbery from the 90s in London, Ontario. The thieves seemed to have keys to the bank, let themselves in and hid in the furnace room until the vault opened. Less than two months later they acquired copies of the bank’s new set of keys and did it again.
Thieves have stolen a bunch of ice cream sandwiches from Rock City Elementary in Nanaimo. The Mounties—who for some reason are investing public resources on the case—believe the thieves got in the through the roof and noted that a number of iPads and computers were left untouched.
As always, thanks for reading! This has been Adam’s Notes for September 5, 2024.
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I really enjoyed Glorious Exploits, and I thought your review was excellent. Also I liked your observations (in the longer review you linked to) about the use of language in historical fiction. As someone who writes HF, I have often noticed the homogenizing and distancing effect of all that pseudo-Victorian dialogue, and I try to avoid it - yet some readers seem to expect it, or it doesn't count as HF, I guess.