Why Do You Write Books?!

Writer’s Block. So what do you do when you get stuck? When the phrases dry up, the words go away, the pixels get the pox?

In my case, I look at the Etruscan Babe-a-licious hanging on my wall and implore her help. But it’s not working, it’s too hot in here, and too hot outside.

So, for no one’s sake but my own, I might as well tell another story, this one tying together Baudelaire’s contribution to this blog, that girl glimpsed on the Paris metro twenty-five years ago, and my current predicament.

About six years ago, while researching for Sea of Faith, I traveled to easternmost Turkey to survey the battlefield of Manzikert, where a decisive clash occurred in 1071 between Byzantine and Seljuk armies. I walked a hilltop overlooking the vast plain, trying to imagine the scene. At the foot of the hill stood a Kurdish village where cinderblock dwellings were interspersed with tall mounds of dung drying for use as winter fuel. The plain, even in the warm weather, looked cold and forbidding.

That evening, while poking around the ruined fortress of Manzikert (now called Malazgirt), my companions and I were approached by two plainclothes policemen: one an avuncular fellow with the requisite Turkish moustache; the other, younger, tall and trim, clean-shaven, silent, with silver eyes and a smile of pure malice. Clearly, he had just walked out of Midnight Express. After an extended conversation, they left us alone, disappearing back in the dusk toward their car.

Dung, battle, winter phantoms, intimations of nastiness – not a banner day.

One of my companions was Turkey’s most prominent woman archeologist, who had kindly agreed to fly me with me from Istanbul to be my guide in this remote region. The other was our driver, a young Arab man from Antakya (history’s Antioch), that sliver of the Arab Middle East that belongs, absurdly, to Turkey rather than to Syria.

Sensing my down mood, the next morning the archeologist suggested we travel to the shores of Lake Van, about twenty miles away and check out a medieval Seljuk graveyard she knew of. Smart cookie: the place was, indeed, magical, its hundreds and hundreds of eight- and nine-foot-tall gravestones covered in elaborate calligraphy, hewn from purple volcanic rock and now standing like forgotten sentinels in a grassy, untended downland. A snow-capped mountain range to the north closed off the perspective; Mount Ararat loomed just over the horizon.

Moods much restored, we pulled away from the graveyard and bumped along the road to the east and the Iranian border. Within a few miles, there was a handmade sign pointing right, to a dirt road leading down to the shore of Lake Van. The sign read, in Turkish, Ottoman Fortress.

My archeologist friend furrowed her brow. She and her colleagues had done an extensive cataloguing of Anatolia’s archeological sites and she was unaware of this castle.

So we took the bait.

Down and down we went, soon confronting a massive wall of fortifications through which an opening had been punched. Then an opening of another wall, of different dimensions and material, and then another. There was stone and rubble littering the ground. “This is not just Ottoman,” said the archeologist with a tremor of excitement. “A lot of people have been this way.”

The road ended at a lakeside village that consisted of four cube-like stone houses that had been constructed from spolia, that is, from the surrounding archeological debris: mismatched blocks of stone from the different fortifications, fragments of pediments, even what looked like a stone arm bent at the elbow, doubtless once part of some classical statuary.

Alongside this wonderful stone hamlet rose a very old mosque, looking quite dilapidated and neglected. “Now this might be Ottoman!” she said.

We peered through the latticework of a locked wooden door into the murky interior, speculating on whether the sanctuary was still in use. Suddenly, from behind us, came the sound of shouting.

We wheeled around to see an imam approaching. He was old and infirm and, of course, blind. I reflexively assumed he was expressing his outrage that an infidel – ie., me – was sullying the precincts of this holy place. But then both my companions burst out laughing.

As the driver chatted amiably with the imam, the archeologist explained: “He said: ‘Why are you looking at this dusty old ruin when the mulberries are ripe? Go up on the roof and get me some!’”

We clambered atop the old dome and from a retaining wall on a slope alongside the structure there grew a profusion of mulberry bushes. We set about harvesting them, feasting on them, their dark juice covering our hands and chins. We laughed a lot.

When we had descended and given the imam his share, we asked him if he had water for us to wash off the juice. He nodded toward the village.

Through the hanging beads in the doorway of the first house, we spied a group of perhaps five or six women, all clad in brilliantly colorful robes, sitting on the floor.

From a discreet distance, my companions asked if there was a well nearby.

Almost immediately, a slender young woman emerged through the beads shouldering an earthenware jug. She was dressed in green and orange robes, her face veiled. She motioned for us to stand to one side.

We watched her as she set off swaying along a pathway to the lake. There was a slight breeze whispering, the sunlight was wan and pleasant, and on a far-off island in the pale lake we could make out the tawny ruins of a medieval Armenian monastery.

The three of us smiled at each other, contented in the moment.

The girl returned with the water, motioned for us to squat so that she could pour it out directly from the jug.

We obeyed and she lowered the earthenware vessel from her shoulder and tipped it. As she did this, her veil slipped.

Now you know what I’m going to say next, right? Baudelaire, the metro… but there is something more here.

She was absolutely exquisite. Sixteen or seventeen, going on eternity. We’ve all seen The Afghan Girl, but this Kurdish girl almost defies description. Just her eyes… they seemed as dark and purple as the Seljuk stone. Only they flashed.

The water splashed on our hands and the three of us looked up at her, transfixed. When she had finished and had one hand free, she gave a hint of smile, modestly acknowledging the consternation she had caused, then readjusted the veil over her face and slipped back through the beaded curtain.

We were shell-shocked. Silent, still squatting, frozen in place.

It was the woman, of course, who first found her voice. The two men had been turned to stone.

“Why do I give lectures in Istanbul?!” the archeologist said heatedly. “Why?! We should all just move here!”

I could say nothing.

She turned to me.

“Why do you write books?!”

Baudelaire Weighs In

On reading a post on this blog, “Etruscan Babe-a-licious,” a novelist friend was moved to send me a poem by Baudelaire. When the great Charles talks, we should listen:

À une passante

La rue assourdissante autour de moi hurlait.

Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,

Une femme passa, d'une main fastueuse

Soulevant, balançant le feston et l'ourlet;

Agile et noble, avec sa jambe de statue.

Moi, je buvais, crispé comme un extravagant,

Dans son oeil, ciel livide où germe l'ouragan,

La douceur qui fascine et le plaisir qui tue.

Un éclair... puis la nuit! — Fugitive beauté

Dont le regard m'a fait soudainement renaître,

Ne te verrai-je plus que dans l'éternité?

Ailleurs, bien loin d'ici! trop tard! jamais peut-être!

Car j'ignore où tu fuis, tu ne sais où je vais,

Ô toi que j'eusse aimée, ô toi qui le savais!

— Charles Baudelaire

To a Passer-By

The street about me roared with a deafening sound.

Tall, slender, in heavy mourning, majestic grief,

A woman passed, with a glittering hand

Raising, swinging the hem and flounces of her skirt;

Agile and graceful, her leg was like a statue's.

Tense as in a delirium, I drank

From her eyes, pale sky where tempests germinate,

The sweetness that enthralls and the pleasure that kills.

A lightning flash... then night! Fleeting beauty

By whose glance I was suddenly reborn,

Will I see you no more before eternity?

Elsewhere, far, far from here! too late! never perhaps!

For I know not where you fled, you know not where I go,

O you whom I would have loved, O you who knew it!

— trans., William Aggeler

Roger Moore to the Rescue?

Someone once told me that Umberto Eco had said something to the effect: “If anyone in the audience asks you a question about the Knights Templar, you can immediately deduct 10 points from his I.Q.”

I wish I had never heard that line. It has poisoned more than one reading for me, when I’m going on about the Cathars or the Crusades – and then someone perfectly reasonable asks the inevitable Templar question. I silently curse Eco for saying something so mean and memorable.

Of course, he exorcised his inner Templar by writing Foucault’s Pendulum, an intellectual parlor-game of a novel in which three bored editors dredge up the effluvium of 600 years of esoteric conspiracy theory and postulate some grand Templar Plan of world domination that is swallowed whole by talentless, credulous writers. Eco’s playful, leviathan of a book – think Dan Brown with an education.

Now it just so happens that I, at last, am obliged to write about the Templars. I have successfully avoided the topic, aside from little excursions with them in the Crusader chapter of Sea of Faith. To be more specific, I have to write about the elimination of the Templars. This event is to Cathar-Mary Magdalene-Freemason-Templar conspiracy theorists what the Big Bang is to the universe.

I’m somewhat daunted; it’s akin to writing something new about Dealey Plaza and the grassy knoll. For those unfamiliar with the tale: on Friday, October 13^th, 1307, every Templar knight in France was arrested. They were subsequently tortured, many of them executed. The charges laid against them were the usual medieval suspects: sorcery, sodomy, heresy, etc. The order was disbanded, their vast wealth appropriated by the king.

Ahh, yes, but was every Templar ensnared? And why were they arrested? What were they hiding? After all, hadn’t they lived for a century on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem? You see what I mean – to take that course is to court madness. Or end up as Nicolas Cage in National Treasure.

But the event itself is interesting. It is distinctly unmedieval, such a large and coordinated dragnet. To find another example of such finely tuned state terror one would have to time-travel to the Saint Bartholomew Day’s Massacre (August 24, 1572) or, using Godwin’s Law, to Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938).

And therein lies my salvation, I think. I shall talk not about the Templars but about the organization men who orchestrated their demise. The main guy is William of Nogaret, a steely political operative who makes Karl Rove and Lee Atwater look like Boy Scouts. And, better still, Nogaret was the king’s point man in dealing with the hero of my story, Bernard Délicieux.

The curse of the Templars has been lifted.

The Fill-in-the-Blank Monologues

Is anyone out there interested in a subject for a doctoral dissertation? I have one: “The Use of Rape as Local Color in Historical Novels.”

It occurred to me on my just completed road trip to and from Canada while listening to Bernard Cornwell’s Agincourt. To establish the evil of the bad guys and the ferocity of the the day, in the first few pages we are given a) a disgusting rape in a London stable, then b) a gigantic gang-bang of nuns in the French town of Soissons. Having posited that bit of nastiness, as a sort of throat-clearing narrative device, the book then goes on to its true subject: longbow technology and the effect, graphically described again and again and again, of a steel-tipped arrow ripping through eyes, throats and various internal organs, followed by pole-axe blows to the brain.

All very medievally well and good, I suppose, but why the rape overture if the author is clearly interested more in gore and merrie olde England? He drops the lurid sex stuff for the remaining 95% of the book. So, could rape be to the historical novel what a subject sentence is to the middle-school paragraph?

Author Michael Baldwin’s treatment of my friends the Cathars, helpfully entitled The Rape of Oc, opens with a bravura fifty or so pages of torture, mutilation and rapine. This then is one horrific extreme – cinema’s equivalent would be Monica Bellucci’s infamous scene in Irreversible – but there are all sorts of other examples in medieval potboilers.

Let’s just take one: Ken Follett. That’s not a name normally associated with this type of unseemliness. Follett has written two books set in the Middle Ages, The Pillars of the Earth (which I have not read but will doubtless watch on cable, medieval junkie that I am) and World Without End. The latter I reviewed for the LA Times (it’s on my website), and in that review I demurely wrote that Follett has a “flair for non-consensual sex scenes [that] borders on the distressing.” I wish I had said more, for in fact Follett uses rape whenever the action flags a little. It’s like a recurring thunderstorm, or a twister touching down every eighty pages or so (the novel is over a thousand pages long). I suspect that he could not get away with this if it were not a well-established, almost expected device in novels set in medieval times.

You say the Middle Ages were like that. Well, perhaps, but there are fine modern medieval novels that do not resort to prurience and sexual violence. Not all authors are like the guys on the couch hitting the scene selection button on their dvd of Irreversible.

Barry Unsworth, ever reliable historical novelist, doesn’t do it. Neither did Hans Koning, whose slim and gracious A Walk With Love and Death (1961), remains one of the most memorable fictional evocations of the Middle Ages (The other, from 1946, which I mentioned in that same Follett review, is Zoe Oldenburg’s The World Is Not Enough). Koning, in fact, does a fairly splendid job at consensual coupling scenes, countering the notion that all medieval sex has to involve daggers, mailed fists and torn undergarments. You have to wonder whether all the rape writers, like my pizza-sharing friend from an earlier post on this blog (“Lost in Translation”), have even heard of courtly love.

So, here are some questions that must be addressed by the doctoral candidate:

Is this device more prevalent in the work of male writers?

On which page of the opening is it most likely to occur? (Statistical analysis required)

Is it an Anglo phenomenon, or does it crop up in the literature of other cultures?

And finally:

Why are so many of the predators priests?

Ahh… but here, you say, we are leaving the realm of historical fiction…

Bridge Work

In 1963, a supremely silly movie called It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World had a group of comically competitive treasure-hunters searching for a cache of $350,000 that they all knew lay buried under a “big W”. What was that “W”? We, in the audience, saw long before the characters that the letter was formed (totally inane spoiler alert) by four very tall, conveniently slanted, palm trees.

Giggles were meant to be induced by this in-your-face dramatic irony. The characters run around a town and repeatedly fail to see what we, the viewers, can see plainly.

Happens all the time.

As visitors from the website may know, I am currently working on a book of medieval history. The action takes place in and around the year 1300, in Carcassonne, France. Now, the primary duty of a writer, long before anything else, is to produce something readable. Duh. And for a writer of non-fiction for a general readership, it’s got to be somehow compelling, to keep the reader interested even as she or he is being informed.

You can’t just list the facts, memo style, and expect anyone to stay awake.

I recently went back to an early chapter of the draft manuscript and saw that I had done just that. It was awful. A succession of snoring paragraphs.

My humiliation was heightened by the fact that the material was interesting. What I needed to convey was that my hero, a fellow named Bernard Délicieux, had to contend with three types of people who would not have been around, say, 100 years earlier. He had, in other words, to deal with the changed circumstances of the year 1300.

These people were: i) obstreperous, literate, seditious, take-no-shit townspeople and traders ii) fanatical, ferociously intelligent inquisitors drawn from the Dominican and Franciscan orders of friars iii) unscrupulous, hyperliterate, anticlerical, litigious, Karl-Rovian operatives of the French king.

What I had done resembled the paragraph above (with slightly more formal language, of course). I’d dutifully taken each group in its turn, talked about the year of such-and-such being founded, given names of particular famous individuals with brief bio squibs, recited facts and factoids, quoted a few primary and secondary sources… the usual.

And it read like a shopping list. I am interested enough in the subject to write a book about it, but even I couldn’t stomach it.

I spent a few days staring at my fish tank, cooking a little, reading books for other chapters, looking at notes, talking to myself, drinking beer, going on very long bike rides.

The rides at least got me away from the apartment. I leave my building then cross a bridge spanning an expressway. A brief moment in a park, then over another bridge, adjacent to an noisy interstate bridge crossing an estuary. The trail continues along the east side of a bay. There are different stretches to which I have given my own private names – Hill of Death, Riverside Drive, Fallopian Straightaway, Voldemort’s Cottage, Milf Alley, etc. – but my favorite part of the ride is The Bridges of Hungover Fishermen. This is in Warren, Rhode Island – two broad, successive pedestrian bridges over the two mouths of a divided inlet. There is always a congregation of all types of people with their fishing poles (and some of them are definitely hungover) on these bridges, casually chatting as out in the bay about a zillion sailboats lie at anchor.

I usually stop there and take in the scene. Man, I like those bridges.

There’s movement, there’s life.

It feels like a narrative, I thought, even though it isn’t one.

Bing! The big W.

Back at the books, I reread about the great come-together event of the year 1300: the Jubilee held in Rome. People from all over Europe came to it. Hundreds of thousands.

And if they came from the north, as my French friends of Bernard had to have done, on arriving in Rome they would have crossed… a bridge.

The Ponte St. Angelo.

Several chroniclers mention it -- the crowds and the very unmedieval traffic cops making everyone coming and going keep to the correct side of the bridge.

Dante, for god’s sake, satirizes it in the Inferno, having pimps and whores imitate the pilgrims to Rome by keeping up pedestrian discipline on a bridge… in Hell.

Jubilee, Dante, everyone there, the year 1300, traders, friars, king’s men, movement, life, a narrative that is not a narrative…

I tore up the chapter and made everyone cross that bridge. The same serial introductions are made, but they are now placed in a context, a historical true-to-life context where there are sights and smells and sounds. With the feeling of a narrative.

And I have Dante to back me up.

You don’t get that in a memo.

(Now, let's just hope it works.)

Lost in Translation

I was sharing a ham and artichoke pizza with a friend. From my coffee table she picked up a book entitled Medieval Cruelty.

“You know,” she began hesitantly. “I don’t think I really know what the word medieval means.”

I gave her a questioning look.

“It means knights and swords and horses, right? Kinda corny?… Cheesy.”

I put down my pizza. Took a sip of Narragansett.

“Ever hear of The Black Death? Cathedrals, crusades, kings? The Inquisition…”

She smiled delphically.

There was another book on the table, Tournament, by David Crouch.

“How about jousting and tournaments? You know, troubadours, courtly love…”

“What was that word you just used?”

“Jousting?”

“No, the other one.”

“Troubadours.”

“Yeah, that’s it.”

“Troubadours, you know, poets singing about the beauty of a lady. The art of courtly love.”

She took a thoughtful munch.

“Never heard of it.”

Dominion Day

Now it’s called Canada Day. The Brit thing has been more or less downplayed since I was a kid (e.g., they got rid of the Union Jack for the maple leaf on the flag), but the Queen happens to be on Canadian soil this year for the celebration. Sort of a farewell tour.

While she’s there, Her Majesty might take the time to ask what actually happened in Toronto last week. Fairly credible reports are emerging that the police strip-searched female protesters, threatened to gang-bang them, and just generally behaved like feral assholes.

Any truth to the allegations?

I’m sure we’ll never find out. Still, in the Over-Reaction Olympics, they own the podium

Now can American liberals please stop building a castle-in-the-sky view of their neighbor to the north?

Happy Birthday, Canada.