Grand unified books thread

[Oexmelin]

Yeah, the only one I could think of then was indeed Jankowski's Verdun. He's a historian of political culture and corruption. I like his work there. But it seems to be a rule in American academia that you end your career writing a book on military topics or Founding Fathers, even if you're not a specialist of the topic, or the methods. One has to sell books to pay for the cabin in the country, I guess.

[The Brain]

Yeah, the only one I could think of then was indeed Jankowski's Verdun. He's a historian of political culture and corruption. I like his work there. But it seems to be a rule in American academia that you end your career writing a book on military topics or Founding Fathers, even if you're not a specialist of the topic, or the methods. One has to sell books to pay for the cabin in the country, I guess.

If you run into him please make him revise the map. Just add "...according to French opinion" or something if he doesn't want to correct the border.

[Savonarola]

I finished "The Long-Haired Kings and other Studies in Frankish History" by JM Wallace-Hadrill.  According to Nennius, nearly every King of the Heptarchy claimed to be a descendant of Wotan (and the current royal family still has him as the founder of the dynasty on their family tree); the Mergovians one-upped them by claiming to be descendants of the Quinotaur.  No one is quite sure what a Quinotaur is; it's supposed to be a descendant of Neptune so there's some speculation that it might have been a sea-monster.  On the other hand Latin had become a scholarly language at that point, and some scholarship of the period was so poor that there's some speculation that it's a misspelling of "Minotaur."

The book presents a fascinating look at the world of the Franks; including the ins and outs of blood feuds.  Unfortunately the book is something of a slog, since it assumes a much greater fluency in Latin than I possess.   Thank goodness (and some insanely dedicated Latinists) for online dictionaries.

[Malthus]

I finished "The Long-Haired Kings and other Studies in Frankish History" by JM Wallace-Hadrill.  According to Nennius, nearly every King of the Heptarchy claimed to be a descendant of Wotan (and the current royal family still has him as the founder of the dynasty on their family tree); the Mergovians one-upped them by claiming to be descendants of the Quinotaur.  No one is quite sure what a Quinotaur is; it's supposed to be a descendant of Neptune so there's some speculation that it might have been a sea-monster.  On the other hand Latin had become a scholarly language at that point, and some scholarship of the period was so poor that there's some speculation that it's a misspelling of "Minotaur."

The book presents a fascinating look at the world of the Franks; including the ins and outs of blood feuds.  Unfortunately the book is something of a slog, since it assumes a much greater fluency in Latin than I possess.   Thank goodness (and some insanely dedicated Latinists) for online dictionaries.

I got a good laugh once, in a museum book shop in England.

I was looking at some posters they had for sale. One featured a genealogical tree for the current royal family. Right at the base of this was "Wotan".

The same poster proudly proclaimed the English monarch as the head of the Church of England. How that comports with proudly announcing one's descent from a pagan god was not explained!

As an aside: descent from a god is a pretty common feature of the "chieftainship" stage of social evolution, where tribes are in the process of becoming states. Of course many states retain this aspect. One theory I read is that this type of claim is intended to justify a permanent social stratification that is not based on merit (one group gets to be aristocrats because they can claim divine ancestry, while others cannot).

[Sheilbh]

I got a good laugh once, in a museum book shop in England.

I was looking at some posters they had for sale. One featured a genealogical tree for the current royal family. Right at the base of this was "Wotan".

The same poster proudly proclaimed the English monarch as the head of the Church of England. How that comports with proudly announcing one's descent from a pagan god was not explained!

The CofE: Catholic and Reformed and Pagan.

Edit: Actually that does help make more sense of Worcester's asparagus blessing service on St George's Day:

[The Minsky Moment]

As an aside: descent from a god is a pretty common feature of the "chieftainship" stage of social evolution, where tribes are in the process of becoming states. Of course many states retain this aspect. One theory I read is that this type of claim is intended to justify a permanent social stratification that is not based on merit (one group gets to be aristocrats because they can claim divine ancestry, while others cannot).

In antiquity and early middle ages it was common to claim ancestry from the Trojans.  For example, the Romans claimed (through Romulus) descent from Aeneas and Mars; the Franks claimed descent from Hector and a sea monster.

[The Brain]

Wasn't there a thread on EUOT? "Odin was a real man"?

[crazy canuck]

Real Men are Odin.

[Savonarola]

As an aside: descent from a god is a pretty common feature of the "chieftainship" stage of social evolution, where tribes are in the process of becoming states. Of course many states retain this aspect. One theory I read is that this type of claim is intended to justify a permanent social stratification that is not based on merit (one group gets to be aristocrats because they can claim divine ancestry, while others cannot).

I once heard a series of lectures on Greek mythology where the professor joked that Zeus was the number one cause of teenage pregnancy in the ancient world.

The primary sources for the Frankish kingdom are poor; so it's not really clear when the Quinotaur story originated.  Gregory of Tours writes about Meroveus, the legendary founder of the dynasty, but he doesn't mention that his father was a Quinotaur.  Fredegar, writing later, is the only source of the Quinotaur. 

[The Minsky Moment]

The primary sources for the Frankish kingdom are poor; so it's not really clear when the Quinotaur story originated.  Gregory of Tours writes about Meroveus, the legendary founder of the dynasty, but he doesn't mention that his father was a Quinotaur.  Fredegar, writing later, is the only source of the Quinotaur.

The true primary sources for just about everything in the period are poor with the occasional exception like Sidonious.  There aren't any primary sources for the origins of any of successor kingdom peoples  - Clovis died more than 25 years before Gregory was born.  The point that comes out of the origin stories for the Franks is that the true Frankish lineage was completely obscure before Clovis' father (Childeric).  Gregory postulated a Chlodio as Childeric's grandfather because that was the most prominent Frankish reference he knew from the Roman records available to him that could fit the time period.  The reality is that Childeric was a leader of a warband made good - who took advantage of unsettled times to carve out a de facto territorial domain.  There is no reason to think his lineage was especially distinguished, and "Merovech" was presumably just another warband leader, one of many of the time.  Even if there were Frankish chroniclers back then, it's doubtful they would have had much to say.  The later chronicles are just filling in the most appropriate back story they can come up with given their own fragmentary information and the reality of obscure origins, with Fredegar likely contributing a misunderstanding of a family legend.

[Savonarola]

I finished up Jorge Luis Borges's collection of short stories "Ficciones;" some of them were kind of dumb, but most were weird and wonderful.  Next up  "Gringo Viejo" by Carlos Fuentes.  ¡Viva Ambrose Bierce!

Maybe it's a weird coincidence but many of the Latin American authors that I've read lived abroad when they were young.  Borges spent his teenage years in Switzerland; Fuentes's father was a diplomat so he lived all over; Isabela Allende father was also a diplomat, she was born in Lima.  The obvious exception is Gabriel Garcia Marquez who grew up in Aracataca, Colombia.  I've seen Aracataca, it's the sort of place where ice would indeed be viewed as the greatest miracle of the age.

[Razgovory]

I wrote up an RPG adventure that involved the Library of Babel.  The villain had discovered the Library only to find it was a trap.  After going mad he escaped and went on a quest to destroy all knowledge by messing with people's memories.  Never did get to run it.

[Savonarola]

I wrote up an RPG adventure that involved the Library of Babel.  The villain had discovered the Library only to find it was a trap.  After going mad he escaped and went on a quest to destroy all knowledge by messing with people's memories.  Never did get to run it.

What system did you design that for?

There's a guy out there who has created a digital Library of Babel.

[grumbler]

Recently finished an excellent and thought-ptoking book, Constance by Matthew FitzSimmons.  It's kind of a scifi murder mystery dystopia novel.  The eponymous protagonist is a musician in the near future.  Her band was just hitting its stride, having recorded its first album and departed on its first tour, when a traffic accident killed two of the four members (including her fiancé) and left her in a deep depression, which hasn't cleared by the time the book starts, some months later.

Constance does have one thing going for her:  her aunt was the one who finally engineered the breakthrough that allowed the recording of all a person's memories, and has gifted Constance a clone.  There's a major industry in preparing clones for the ultra-wealthy (the only ones who can afford the fees) and then keeping the memories of the clients up-to-date so that, if anything happens to the client, the client's clone is awakened and given the last recorded memories.  A way around death, it seems.

Constance goes in to have her recorded memories updated, as all clients do once a month, and wakes up in a hospital bed.  The bed is in the facility that stores the cloned bodies of the clients.  She's a restored clone.

She immediately faces three problems.  First, her memories are eighteen months old.  That's never supposed to happen, because memories degrade over time and no one has ever successfully recovered from an eighteen month memory gap.  The corporation running the facility doesn't want the bad publicity of a clone failing, so they don't want to let her go; they want to just terminate her and pretend all of this didn't happen.  She has to escape and avoid the corporation's agents.  That's the scifi adventure element.

Constance's second problem is that she's not a legal person to many jurisdictions and in the minds of many people.  In most US jurisdictions she isn't even considered alive, and can be killed without consequences.  There are religious fanatics organized to kill all the clones they can get their hands on.  That is the dystopian element.

Constance's third problem is that she is compelled to find out what happened to the original Constance, and what has happened to her over the last eighteen months.  That's the murder mystery.

Fitzsimmons makes all of this work and, in the process, presents us with a memorable and admirable protagonist.  My only complaint was that I figured out what was happening about 100 pages before Constance did, but, even then, there were plot twists that took me by surprise but made perfect sense in hindsight.

I thought that it was a beautiful story well-told, and provocative as hell.  If you like any of these genres, I recommend it.

[Razgovory]

I wrote up an RPG adventure that involved the Library of Babel.  The villain had discovered the Library only to find it was a trap.  After going mad he escaped and went on a quest to destroy all knowledge by messing with people's memories.  Never did get to run it.

What system did you design that for?

There's a guy out there who has created a digital Library of Babel.

GURPs.  As you can guess, I also liked Ficciones.