Five Great Novels- Season Two, Part Two

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The author asserts that every word of this post is his original intellectual property, and also begs anyone using any of the content or ideas herein to simply cite appropriately. 

WARNING: This article contains spoilers. 

Alexandre Dumas' best known work, The Three Musketeers, gave me an intellectual break.  The deeper literary themes of this novel were less apparent, if not less present, than in Gone With the Wind.  Of course, Barnes & Noble, in their admirable edition, threw my way a series of concluding questions which did force me to examine more deeply the context in which Dumas wrote.  

In this, I mean the conflict between Milady and the Four Musketeers, in which the enemy seemingly rendered weakest by her sex proved to be the most dangerous of enemies.  Compare her, perhaps, with Cardinal Richelieu, the enemy who would seem foremost among the villains of the novel.  Richelieu is, when taken along with all his resources, the most dangerous of enemies.  However, when reduced to himself, without lackeys or political power, Richelieu is a much less formidable foe.  Milady de Winter, however, demonstrates that even without outside assistance, she possesses the wherewithal to overcome even the most impossible of circumstances-- for instance, her imprisonment.  With only her natural weapons-- her beauty, mind, and voice-- she is able not only to escape her prison, but to manipulate her kind-hearted jailer to committing murder on her behalf.  

We return then, to the conflict between Milady and our heroes.  Unlike the other agents of the Cardinal, who may be killed in open conflict in the manner common to the male sex, Milady must be eliminated in a manner socially acceptable as regards to the treatment of women.  To have killed her in open conflict in the street would have been unthinkable.  Rather, the Musketeers were forced to follow the legal system to eliminate an opponent who fights with weapons much unlike their own.  It is worth noting that the Musketeers, when confronted with opponents like themselves, emerge the victors with few injuries.  Milady, however, though fighting with the more feminine weapons of manipulation and poison, is considered a dangerous opponent throughout. 

I believe the analogy made by Dumas regarding this conflict is that of a lion and a serpent.  The young lions, the Musketeers, when confronted-with those of their own stature, emerge the victor.  But, like the lion who is confronted by a poisonous serpent, he must exercise great care to avoid the fangs of an enemy who does not place value in great size or strength, but rather speed, cunning, and a single, deadly strike.

Therefore, while I still would hesitate to grant that The Three Musketeers possesses any great degree of depth, it is clear that Dumas, in pitting the Musketeers against so foreign an enemy, did great service to the novel.  If the role of Milady had been filled instead by a male, he would have proven a less-capable enemy.  Failing that, the heroes would have seen the story reduced to a single, dramatic bout of swordplay, in which the great villain falls too easily, or our heroes suffer too harshly. 

Five Great Novels- Season Two, Part One

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The author asserts that every word of this post is his original intellectual property, and also begs anyone using any of the content or ideas herein to simply cite appropriately. 

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind, first published in 1936, has been on my radar for quite some time.  I grew-up exposed to the film, and at one point attempted to read through this monstrous volume.  Obviously, I failed.  With this in mind, I decided to place this novel in the first slot (American Novel) of my Summer 2014 Five Great Novels rotation. 

This novel took an unreasonable amount of time to finish—well over a month.  With that being said, my experience was enjoyable; this was one of the few novels in which I have been able to observe veritable layers of plot.  The broadest of these plots is the Gotterdammerung of Southern culture.  We see the South as it was before the war, followed by the process of its inevitable destruction, and later are presented with a reborn culture, a shadow of the past.  Regressively, there is the plot of action within Scarlett’s social circle.  Herein, those with gumption thrive, despite the death of their culture, and those without are doomed to relive a past which will never return.  This gumption should not be confused with a willingness to part from the original culture, as even those who cling to the past, yet bend in order to survive, are successful.  For example, the Fontaines and the Merriweathers, whom one cannot possibly claim have abandoned their past, are able to find success in a new, if not foreign culture.  At the most personal level is the plot surrounding Scarlett’s own life, her romantic affairs with her three husbands and other assorted beaux, including the pitiable Ashley Wilkes. 

It is precisely this layered plot which makes Gone With the Wind a novel of such great worth.  The novel documents a culture with all the bias of a people whose combined experience of bitterness and destruction has been discounted in favor of that of the victor.  Naturally, the novel is considered to be of racist leanings, as I discovered, much to my own humor, by browsing the Barnes & Noble website.  To this, my response is—‘ Of course the novel has racist leanings, it describes a culture firmly-rooted with a dichotomy of race which determined social class.’  But we should not discount Gone With the Wind for what in our politically-correct era would be considered it’s racist tendencies.  For although we may consider such language and themes to be bigotry, it is in fact a picture of a different time, and those who wish to make a fuss over a novel written before the Civil-Rights Movement, and largely set in a time before the Fourteenth Amendment, need to get over themselves. 

Five Great Novels, an Introduction

In the Fall of 2013, while a student at CIU, I was in a literature class called Five Great Novels.  The course was pretty self-explanatory-- We would devote an entire semester to five novels of worth, based-upon a unifying theme.  The five novels explored in that course were: The Scarlet Letter, Crime and Punishment, Pride and Prejudice, A Brave New World, and The Remains of the Day. The unifying theme of all these novels was the exploration of the human conscience.

In the Spring of 2014, my graduation was looming, and I knew that if I was to stand any chance, I would need to keep reading regularly.  Accordingly, I hatched a diabolical plan.  I would strive to read five valuable novels each season, totalling twenty novels each year.  I ditched the idea of a unifying theme, in favor of a simpler template, which I have since also abandoned.  Now, it is largely determined by which five works I would like to read, with some form of deadline involved.  My first Season, last Spring, included the following works:

1. The Last of the Mohicans- James Fenimore Cooper
2.  Frankenstein- Mary Shelley
3. "The Wasteland"- T. S. Eliot 
4.  A Storm of Swords- George R. R. Martin
5. The Stranger- Albert Camus

Now that I am on a blogging-streak, however short-lived it may turn out to be, I have decided to add a new section to my blog, one that involves this whole scheme of Five Great Novels.  I am currently working on Season 2 of Five Great Novels, with Gone With the Wind finished and The Three Musketeers nearly done. Expect to hear more soon!

There is Nothing Romantic about Being a Scrivener

Note: This is a passing reference to Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener”, published in 1856.  A scrivener is a legal copyist, a now defunct occupation which involves painstaking replicating legal documents by hand.

Recently, I have been blessed with a job at a company called CoPart, a multi-million dollar corporation in the automotive industry.  In short—we sell salvage vehicles, and do it wonderfully.  Therefore, as a part of my job, I am responsible for filling-out titles for new buyers.  Early-on in this activity, I chuckled to myself when I thought of Bartleby and his business of being a scrivener.  Of course, my job is entirely more comfortable than that of Bartleby, and I would prefer a great many more things than he in my service. 

Nonetheless, I find myself consoled by my travels, and by my books.  Especially thoughts of the Black Forest, which bring tears to my eyes as I stare at my computer or fill-out paperwork.  These thoughts cause me to halt and contemplate my adventures, if just for a moment.  They constantly remind me that although I am very blessed with my job, and although I love it as a temporary occupation until I go back to school, I know that it does not fit my heart.  I am passionate about other things, about history and literature, and art—these have no place in an office.

In this I find great encouragement, knowing that although I am happy now with where God has placed me, I will not be able to rest until I am a professional scholar, for better or worse.  My only fear is that I do not have the mind to set me in a place of scholarship, and that I am doomed to do that which I do not love because I am incapable of that which I do. 

Until such a time as I am once again in the academic world, I will continue to work hard for CoPart, but I feel that I am destined for something quite different from that which I am now doing. 

The Failings of a Reticent Historian

Note: One of the newer additions to my vocabulary is the word ‘Reticent’, or ‘Reticence’, to which I was exposed by a translation of M. Dumas’ The Three Musketeers, in which the translator uses reticent to describe the demeanor of Athos. To be ‘Reticent’ is to be not given to speech, or to be normally silent.

I have been grieved by a section of the American population.  A group not defined by race, nor age, nor socioeconomic status, but by the way they treat history.  This group is a mob of pretenders, who espouse their appreciation of history in a peculiar way.  In their efforts to show their great love of all things old, they find it necessary to remove or otherwise damage historical artifacts and sites.  Of course, there is no better way to preserve and appreciate history than to destroy or steal from it.

                                    

My wife and I once visited the Ninety-Six National Historic Site together.  At the entrance to the park, there is placed a replica cannon barrel, protected by iron bars from vandals.  It was this cannon barrel which first brought to my attention the phenomenon of historical destruction.  You see, people touch things, and when they do so, they leave bits of oil on the object.  This oil from the hands does very little damage by itself, but when thousands of visitors touch an object, it creates an awful lot of damage that is not immediately apparent.

 Let us return to our replica cannon barrel at Ninety-Six.  Even if it were touched by the modest number of one-thousand people in one year, the oil and grit left on it would be tremendous.  Multiply that over the course of a decade— which in the scheme of history is quite little— and the damage done to a historical artifact, or even to a carefully constructed replica, could be fatal. 

Ninety-Six Battlefield, with earthworks in the foreground
and the Star Fort behind.

This gradual destruction also occurs in the landscape of a historical site.  To begin, particularly with earthen ramparts, roads, and the like, land wears-down with time.  Largely, this cannot be helped, so the historical appreciator is free from guilt.  This is the case, in my experience, of the Star Fort and Ninety-Six, the trenches at Spotsylvania Battlefield, and the earthen portions of Fort Moultrie.  Again, it is largely unavoidable.  However, those who wish to touch and experience history tend to further contribute to the washing-away of these earthen artifacts, which, once gone, will have gone forever.  Therefore, I plead with anyone who visits a historical site not to tread on earthworks.  Now, there is a caveat to this request; certain historical sites allow visitors to stand-upon earthworks.  In these locations, everyone should feel free to stand-upon the earthworks, but not to intentionally damage them in any way.

The worst crime one can commit upon a historical site, and one which makes me sick to my stomach, due in majority to the offense itself, and in part to my own reticence on the matter, is the removal of historical artifacts from their site of rest for personal pleasure.  Of course, as with any strong feeling, mine stem from an actual event to which I bore witness.  During my travels to Europe, I had the privilege of visiting some remarkably well-preserved trenches on the Western Front, near Mulhouse, France.  These century-old trenches looked much as they did at the Armistice, even down to the rusted barbed-wire which has lain still for nearly a century.  Imagine my horror, when, upon leaving this hallowed site, I observed three members of our group wrapping-up a section of barbed-wire to take home to the United States.  Of course, I said nothing, despite my shock, and I profoundly regret it. 

The trenches at Mulhouse, largely
unchanged since 1918. 

To those people—whom I refuse to name—if you by some chance come across this article, shame on you for what you did.  I understand that it was out of appreciation for the subject, and for the sake of memory that you did so, but I believe that you neglected to think—as many do—that such an object was not yours to take.  In addition, your response may be that it was cowardly of me to call you out in a public blog, rather than to confront you in person.  I admit to this cowardice, although for your sake, and that of our entire group, perhaps it is better that I could not find the words to say to you at the time, for they would not have been kind. 

To all who by chance may read this blog, I beg you in sincerity not to remove anything from a historical site, for any reason.  If you do,  the immediate damage may be as oil on a brass cannon, barely noticeable in the single occurrence.  But over the course of a decade, or a century, if each visitor to a site robs but a little, thinking it no large matter, any trace of living history on that site will be destroyed.

So again, I implore everyone not to harm historical sites beyond what is expected of time and weather, for this historical appreciator, reticent no longer, will have strong words for you.

Lord of The Rings Miniatures Gallery

One of the things that I love to do, but seldom have time for, is paint miniatures.  I don't claim to be the best painter, but I am very happy with how my skills have progressed over the last eight years.  So here are a few pictures of some things I've done in the past.  I will occasionally post galleries in lieu of posts, some of recently-painted minis, others which I painted years ago.

1/15/2014

Boromir of Gondor

Clearly, I spent more time on this angle than the
front of the miniature. 

Gandalf the Grey

Photo credits to my lovely wife, who
arranged these snapshots.

Trivial Pursuits- The NFL

Many Americans have a comprehensive understanding of how the National Football League is structured.  However, imagine a scenario with me...

The National Football League is the organization
responsible for the regulation of the highest level
of professional American Football.

Someone close to you (boyfriend, father-in-law, etc.) is absolutely hooked when it comes to football, but you can't tell a hash-mark from a halftime show.  For some reason, it is required for you to reach-out to this football maniac, and you think that this might be a good bonding-point... If only you could appreciate the subtle differences between the New England Patriots and the Texas Longhorns (just so you know, one is a college team). This Trivial Pursuit should help you to understand how the NFL is organized in terms of who plays whom, but it won't do anything to help you understand the game itself.

The NFL is divided in two ways, first by Conference, and then by geographic location.  Let's start the breakdown.  There are two conferences in the NFL: The American Football Conference (AFC), and the National Football Conference (NFC).  Each conference contains sixteen professional teams, which combined make-up the thirty-two team NFL.  The origin of both conferences is found in the 1966 merger between the National Football League and the American Football League.  Up until that point, the two Leagues were not associated, but in an effort to consolidate, they merged.  The teams from the old NFL stayed together as the NFC, and the old AFL became the AFC.  Of course, the name of the two consolidated leagues remained the NFL, so don't get confused between the old NFL (NFC) and the new NFL (NFC and AFC).  

Now for the second way that the NFL is divided: Geographically.  Each Conference is divided into four geographic regions of four teams each- North, South, East, and West (4+4+4+4=16; 16x2=32 NFL Teams). These four units within each Conference are called Divisions.  Here is a quick breakdown of each division.

The logo of the National Football Conference.

NFC East:                                                    NFC North:

Dallas Cowboys                                           Chicago Bears

New York Giants                                         Detroit Lions

Philadelphia Eagles                                       Green Bay Packers

Washington Redskins                                   Minnesota Vikings

NFC South:                                                 NFC West:

Atlanta Falcons                                            Arizona Cardinals

Carolina Panthers                                        St. Louis Rams

New Orleans Saints                                     San Francisco 49ers

Tampa Bay Buccaneers                               Seattle Seahawks

The logo of the American Football Conference.

AFC East:                                                   AFC North:

Buffalo Bills                                                 Baltimore Ravens

Miami Dolphins                                           Cincinnati Bengals

New England Patriots                                  Cleveland Browns

New York Jets                                            Pittsburgh Steelers

AFC South:                                                 AFC West:

Houston Texans                                          Denver Broncos 

Indianapolis Colts                                       Kansas City Chiefs

Jacksonville Jaguars                                   Oakland Raiders

Tennessee Titans                                        San Diego Chargers

'What's the point?' you ask.  Why lay-out which teams are in which division, and why does it matter to you?  Because it helps to know why each team plays the opponents they do (believe it or not, it isn't random).  Each team plays sixteen games in a seventeen-week season, with one week off.  Of those sixteen games, six are played against other teams from the same Division (two each).  Another six games are played against teams within that same Conference (one each).  Finally, each team, over the course of a football season, will play four games against teams from the opposite Conference (one each).  Therefore, out of sixteen games played by a given team, twelve are played against teams from the same Conference, six of which are from the same Division and six from other Divisions, with a further four games played against teams from the opposite Conference. 

A brief recap might help.  There are four teams to a Division, four Divisions to a Conference, and two Conferences in the NFL.  Therefore, there are thirty-two teams in the NFL.  Any given team will play sixteen games in a season, three-quarters against teams from the same Conference, one-quarter against teams from the opposite Conference.  Each team gets one week-off during the season where they play no game. 

So the next time your football-crazed family-member wants to bond over some gridiron action, remember this Trivial Pursuit, and enjoy the game. 

Trivial Pursuits- The Schlieffen Plan

Imagine with me for a moment:

You are having dinner at the house of someone with whom you have nothing in common (in-laws, boss, distant cousins, etc.).  Apart from the clink of glasses, the clearing of throats, and the awkward sounds of chewing and swallowing, there is no sound.  You try not to make eye-contact with the already-irritable host, lest you be compelled to tell him about your comprehensive five-year plan for economic success.  Carefully, you flit your eyes upward, trying to catch sight of the grandfather clock in the hallway-- do you really have to stay for dessert?-- to see that it's only 7:33.  As you move your eyes back to your plate of rubbery chicken and overcooked green beans, thinking about that other thing you could be doing, you lock eyes with your host (think cranky boss).  They raise their eyebrows, obviously desiring some form of human communication.  You open your mouth and all that comes out is a gurgling sound reminiscent of a small animal being strangled.

This blog post, and those that are sure to follow, will prevent you from making a gurgling sound in someone's dining-room.

The Schlieffen Plan, the German plan for the invasion of
France designed in 1904 and executed in 1914.  The purpose
of this strategy was to avoid the French line of defense.

In the Summer of 1914, Germany invaded the neutral nations of Luxembourg and Belgium in an effort to bypass French defenses along the Franco-German border.  These defenses had been built as a direct result of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1), in which Germany put the French to shame.  The French reasoned that if they could build an elaborate string of well-defended fortresses on the border, any attempted invasion would be thwarted by sheer force of defense.  The German counter-strategy was sinfully basic-- they would go around the complex network of heavily-defended fortresses, rendering them useless.  Their plan, originally developed in 1904, was called The Schlieffen Plan, after its architect.

Of course, in order to bypass the French defenses, which ran all the way to the Franco-Belgian border, the Germans would have to invade neutral Belgium.  The original plan of the German government was to ask politely whether or not the Belgians would allow Germany the use of their o-so-splendid railway system.  The Germans, however, learned that in no uncertain terms the Belgians were not interested.  So the Germans thought 'What have we got to lose?' and marched on Belgium anyway.  The move allowed the majority of the German Army to come down behind French lines, in a drive straight to Paris.  The Germans would fail to reach the city after a tactical blunder allowed the French and British forces time to reorganize, resulting in the Battle of the Marne.  The Germans would never reach Paris.  After the Marne, the battle-lines would largely stabilize, leading to the now-infamous trench warfare.

So my friends, the next time you are expected to fill an awkward silence, you have no excuses.  Remember the German invasion of France, and you should be able to fill the time long enough to stimulate someone else to trivial conversation.