Something cool happened

Adam's Notes for April 11, 2024

The Peasant and the Nest Robber, by Bruegel the Elder, 1568. I was thinking about this painting while writing my story.

I have some good news to share: my short story “The Ball Game” has been longlisted for the 2024 CBC Short Story Prize! 

There’s a short profile of me on the CBC Books page. You can view it here. The full longlist is here.

It’s very encouraging news for me. I’ve been writing for years, though I only started taking it seriously a few months into the pandemic, and so far it’s mostly just been an online thing. I always feel a little bit awkward or embarrassed trying to talk about it in person. But I feel like making the longlist is going to force me get over that, in a good way. It’s very exciting for me.

I believe the shortlist will be announced next week and the winner the week after.

Pepys Show: April 1661 — a ghost, a parrot, and a door made of human skin

Samuel Pepys month begins with him staying late at his parents’ house to arbitrate a fight they’re having over the maid. Pepys sides with his father, “persuading my mother to understand herself, and that in some high words, which I was sorry for, but she is grown, poor woman, very froward.” His father is for the maid and his mother against. Maybe foreshadowing Pepys’ future dalliance with his own maid, Deb Willet? Pepys stops by again the next day and finds his mother still weeping, but he has business to attend to, and when he checks in on them that evening, he finds them in a much better mood. 

At the Dolphin he finds his colleagues Williams Batten and Pen so drunk and riled up at each other that he feels ashamed to see it. Pepys reports drinking a good deal of wine himself, and the next day finds himself hungover and unable to bear the sound of the men working on his house. Batten and Pen stop by and have him drink some sack as a cure. There’s another bout of drinking with the two Williams on the fifth, and they start betting on people’s weight, which is pretty funny.

On the 8th, business takes Pepys out of town to the navy’s Hill House at Chatham. He has a pleasant dinner and stays overnight, but his buddy tells him that his predecessor “did die and walk in my chamber,” Pepys says he tried to play off his fear at this news for laughs, but even so, he woke up at 3am terrified that his pillow, which he had thrown from his bed, was standing upright. Like the dead guy.

Still, his stature is rising, and he reports of the trip that, “in general it was a great pleasure all the time I staid here to see how I am respected and honoured by all people; and I find that I begin to know now how to receive so much reverence, which at the beginning I could not tell how to do.”

On the 10th, he’s still on the road, now visiting the dockhouses, where one of the builders offered “my Lady Batten a parrot, the best I ever saw, that knew Mingo (Batten’s servant) so soon as it saw him, having been bred formerly in the house with them; but for talking and singing I never heard the like. My Lady did accept of it.” 

Later Pepys visits the cathedral in Rochester and observes “the great doors of the church, which, they say, was covered with the skins of the Danes.” Apparently it was common for church doors to be covered with so-called skins of people who had tried to rob them, often said to be Danish pirates (vikings?). I doubt it was real human skin, but some guys with microscopes in the 1800s were ready to swear it actually was.

After wine and oysters at a tavern, he attends a private ‘collacion’, or concert, with two fiddles (“one a base viall”), but Pepys complains the music wasn’t very good, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off Mrs. Rebecca Allen (daughter of the clerk of the ropeyard). Pepys is forced to dance with the men and feels embarrassed at how bad he is. Mrs Allen however, dances very well, and “seems the best humoured woman that ever I saw.” He eventually dances¹ with her and reports she “seemed, I know not why, in that and other things, to be desirous of my favours and would in all things show me respects.” He walks her home and she has him sing and they end up at a different party, with better music, and he has, “the opportunity of kissing Mrs. Rebecca very often.” It seems to be one of his happier and less problematic dalliances (this month alone he has already followed a tavern wench into a back chamber and forced a kiss on her).

The next morning, Pepys reports, “I did again please myself with Mrs. Rebecca, and about 9 o’clock, after we had breakfasted, we sett forth for London, and indeed I was a little troubled to part with Mrs. Rebecca, for which God forgive me.” I don’t think he goes quite as far with her as this makes it seem, though, if only because he hasn’t resorted to his usual horny mishmash of Latin, Spanish, and French to cover up the precise deeds.

On the ride home he jokes with Lady Batten, buys some ale off of students who are supposed to be bringing it to their schoolmaster, and flirts (?) and jokes with some country folk. It’s ruined only partially by riding, “under the man that hangs upon Shooter’s Hill, and a filthy sight it was to see how his flesh is shrunk to his bones.” He spends the night at home with his wife, concluding this was, “the pleasantest journey in all respects that ever I had in my life.”

On the twelfth, he learns that someone has used his absence to forge his signature on the tickets used to pay seamen. The man is now in jail and Pepys gives his consent to have him prosecuted.

Preparations for the upcoming coronation of Charles II are causing congestion on the streets of London, but Pepys is able to avoid it and expense his travel on the Thames by boat (according to Claire Tomaline’s biography). And so at Whitehall he gets to see the king practice the ancient ritual of the royal touch, or laying on of hands, by which the king’s touch is said to heal those afflicted with scrofula. Pepys reports that the king did it, “with great gravity, and it seemed to me to be an ugly office and a simple one.”

Next time: Pepys gets blackout drunk at the coronation!

(Quick reminder that Old Moon Quarterly 6, which contains my short story “Diary of the Wolf,” is now available in ebook and paperback.)

Links

The Multiplication of Monsters: From Gutenberg to Qanon: Internet misinformation having a precedent in the explosion of sensationalist nonsense that spread after the invention of the Gutenberg press is a pretty common topic these days. What makes this essay by Stefan Andriopolous at Public Books special is that the author gives some great examples of early Gutenberg nonsense (the pope ass! the monk calf!), but also talks about how Marx and Engels, centuries later, dealt with a similar “domain of foul and unnerving literature” that arose in the wake of the rotary printing press. In short: they adopted the technology themselves, remained steadfast in their optimism that the truth would win out, and repurposed sensationalist language to their own ends (e.g. the metaphor of the spectre/ghost of communism).

Is it even good? Two years with Zola: This essay by Brandon Taylor on Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart cycle is worth your time. I’ve only read five or six of the twenty novels in the cycle, but each one blew me away. He’s right that L'Assommoir (the study on working class alcoholism) is better than Nana (the one about the prostitute actress), but more than that he captures what’s so great about these books: no matter your station in life, high or low, you’re bound to find something in one of these novels that resonates deeply with you, even one hundred and fifty years later. Last time I tried to read them, I think I got bogged down in The Debacle (the one about the military upsets at the end of Second Empire), but Taylor points out that The Earth (the one about the farmers) leads into it, and I had skipped it, so maybe that’s where I’ll pick up (there’s a couple of different reading orders for the series, Zola himself recommended against reading them in chronological order and Taylor offers his own order here).

#Heistwatch: by now you’ve probably already heard about the $30M heist in LA, so here’s what’s being called a ‘reverse art heist’ in Germany, where a man snuck one of his own paintings into a gallery.

Alright, that’s all for now. Thanks for reading. Find me on:

Instagram | Goodreads | Letterboxd | Bluesky

1. This is only Pepys second time dancing. Shamefully, I missed that his first ever bout of dancing was on the 27th of March 1661, the period covered in my last newsletter, at the Dolphin with ‘sir Williams both’ and their entourages. Remember, Pepys grew up in a Parliamentarian household where this sort of thing was discouraged. Later he’ll fight with his wife over her wish to take dancing lessons.