Four Books, a Blog, and an Edda

Since part of what I'm championing here is reclaiming your time and using it for stuff you like, here’s a small interlude in which I appreciate some stuff I like.


The Lost German Slave Girl, by John Bailey. Narrative non-fiction that reads like a thriller, with the atmosphere of old New Orleans thick on the page. A woman walking through New Orleans in 1843 spots the long-lost daughter of her best friend — but the girl is a slave. “Had a defenseless European orphan been callously and illegally enslaved, or was she an imposter?” The book is about the multi-year quest to free Sally Miller. There are some eye-popping twists near the end. The final page is a masterpiece of interpretation. I loved this book.

A Profound Secret, by Josceline Dimbleby. The pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones wrote as many as six letters a day to May Gaskell, and painted a haunting portrait of her daughter Amy. They had one of those Victorian relationships of profound, tormented affection. And then Amy died a mysterious death. The book is written by Amy’s great-niece, Josceline Dimbleby (known in Britain for her cookery writing). A window onto the emotions of the Victorian age, and it will make you fonder of Burne-Jones than his strange flat paintings would suggest.

The Innocent Anthropologist: Notes from a Mud Hut, by Nigel Barley. This one is laugh-out-loud funny. Nigel Barley sets out to describe what it’s *really* like to do anthropological field-work, when you’re tormented by an incomprehensible language, irritable loneliness, termites, goats, and desiccated hands in the thatching of your mud hut. He lived with the Dowayos in Africa, an interesting pagan group whose social structure revolves around circumcision. Of course they were very keen to know Barley’s standing on this topic. The otherness of the culture is genuinely other: when they hadn’t seen Barley for a while, the (male) villagers would sit in his lap and stroke his hair, much puzzled and amused by his discomfiture. What they do if you try to take their photo (hold you down and put sticks in your ear) shows that you really, really can’t make assumptions about cultures. He’s done the opposite of what he meant to — he makes it sound like a lot of fun.

Skeletons on the Zahara, by Dean King. While we’re out and about in other cultures, this story of a shipwreck in 1815 provides entrée to a part of the world you don’t hear much about: the inhabitants of the Sahara, who took the shipwrecked sailors captive, in the early nineteenth century. It’s one of those rare miracles that the sailors (to be precise, some of them) made it through alive: a matter of stoicism, endurance, and bluff. Fascinating stuff about the desert-dwellers, and a sense that the laws of humankind are much more provisional than one would like to believe. The author went travelling around the Sahara by camel as research for the book. This is one of those top-sellers that deserves its place on the lists.

David Byrne’s blog. http://journal.davidbyrne.com/
Isn’t the Internet so wonderful? David Byrne takes photos where he’s not supposed to (and then he posts them), reads books and muses on them, visits out-of-the-way parts of the world, and constructs a musical event on the life of Imelda Marcos. Recently he’s been reading about the Maya and Victorian engravings of Mayan ruins, all Romantic and Ozymandian: “Tourist brochures for the subconscious.” O brave new world, that has such blogging in’t.

Edda, Myths from Medieval Iceland -- a CD from the medieval music group Sequentia. Halfway between a gorgeous strange work of music and a curiosity, this re-creation of the medieval Edda is odd and mind-blowing. But would the real singers of the Edda have had such beautiful classically trained voices? But if this were just any old bards singing, would modern audiences buy the CD? However inauthentic it has to be, it’s as authentic as it’s going to get. People who have entered Germanic mythology by the Tolkien door will like the Voluspa’s famous list of supernatural creatures, which includes Gandalf, Bombur, Nori, Durinn, et al. The most haunting selection is the second one, in which Odinn recounts his “taking up” of the runes. You can easily believe yourself thrown back a thousand years as you listen to this. Note that the real word in the last line is “blota” — blood!

Veitzu hvé rísta skal?
Veitzu hvé rátha skal?
Veitzu hvé fá skal?
Veitzu hvé freista skal?
Veitzu hvé bithia skal?
Veitzu hvé blóta skal?

Do you know how one must carve?
Do you know how one must construe?
Do you know how one must paint?
Do you know how one must try?
Do you know how one must pray?
Do you know how one must sacrifice?