“Ship, Are There Any More Cookies?”

The ship You Sexy Thing has its own agenda! It is programmed to deliver the putated hijackers — the owner and staff of the Last Chance restaurant from TwiceFar Station — to IAPH (the International Association of Pirate Havens) but it has secretly decided: “not until I learn how to cook!”

Because, the whole time, Thing has been absorbing lessons from the chef and has been experimenting with meals, and then recording the emotions of the crew as they partake of its meals — hunger, pleasure — and this has become Thing‘s addiction.

Self feared, the first time she realized Thing had agency, that the book was entering HAL 1000/2001 Space Odyssey territory. Who knows, it still might veer that way. In the meantime, the crew has discovered that they have a stowaway: one of the twelve heirs to the Empress of the Hive Mind, a 17-year-old who was shipped to TwiceFar Station in a crate — Quel mystère! Good thing the chef decided to open the crate, just before the explosions that destroyed the station!

Sentence of the Day: The Terror

Surgeons Stanley, Goodsir, Peddie, and McDonald recommended to Sir John that the men’s diet be changed — fresh food when possible (although there was almost none except polar bear possible in the dark of winter, and they had discovered that eating the liver of that great, ponderous beast could be fatal for some unknown reason) and, failing finding fresh meat and vegetables, cutting back on the men’s preferred salt pork and beef, or salted birds, and relying more on the tinned foods — vegetable soups and the like.

— The Terror, by Dan Simmons, pp. 70 – 71

New Book: The Terror, by Dan Simmons

An hour past midnight. Finished the glorious Samuel Pepys biography a half hour ago.

Still craving a read that will definitively take her out of herself, she’s decided to tackle this novel, recommended by a member of self’s writing group:

Almost a mile off the starboard bow, the gigantic floating ice mountain that hides Terror’s sister ship, Erebus, from view seems for a brief, false moment to radiate colour from within, glowing from its own cold, internal fires.

— The Terror, by Dan Simmons, p. 4

Samuel Pepys: A Diary

In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously . . . even if he had no idea what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.

He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally, there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration.

— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin, p. 79

Claire Tomalin, wow. Just wow.

This is a re-read. The first time she read it, she was on her way to Berlin to give a reading. She had it on her lap the whole flight, but it turned out her seatmate was a young Finnish architect who was going home after making a bid on behalf of his architectural firm for a building in Beijing. He ended up explaining Berlin to her, making little drawings on her notebook: here’s the Brandenburg gate, here’s Oranienstrasse, this street has the best Turkish food, etc.

She remembered being amazed, not just by Berlin, but by the book. Who knows why she decided to re-read it now (motives will be examined, later, in her journal, lol). She didn’t expect her re-read to evoke the same spark of excitement that it did on first read, 15 years (!) ago, but for some reason the above passage read really fresh.

(To be continued)

The Incas of Peru

Once Tenochtitlan had fallen to Cortes, the greed of the Spaniards knew no bounds. Francisco Pizarro led the Spanish effort to take the mountain city of Cuzco. He tried to follow Cortes’s strategy of allying with certain disaffected groups, but Pizarro’s soldiers treated their ostensible allies so cruelly that the allies began to melt away with disgust.

The attack on Cuzco was led by Francisco Pizarro’s brother, Hernando. His opponent was an erstwhile ally named Manqo, who instead organized a resistance that had “tens of thousands of indigenous troops” converging on the Inca city. While Manqo and his allies stayed in the hills, the Spanish in the valley “could only watch the swelling numbers of natives with dread.”

Manqo waited patiently until the sheer weight of numbers was overwhelmingly in his favour. Then, on Saturday, 6 May, he launched a concerted attack . . . in which the Inca combined the power of their slings with an innovative technique that was as unexpected as it was devastating: all the stone had been made red-hot in the campfires . . . Inca warriors tied three stones to the ends of tight ropes connected to dried llama tendons, which, when thrown, twirled and tangled themselves around the legs of the horses, bringing most of them down.”

— Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest, by Fernando Cervantes, pp. 299 – 300

To be continued . . .

Spaniards in Tenochtitlan

For the past week, self has been immersed in Fernando Cervantes’s Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest.

There must be a reason people watch films like Apocalypto. Self could not look away, even in the passages dealing with human sacrifice (e.g. A Mexica chief thought nothing of sacrificing fifty individuals at a festival, etc etc).

Picture this moment: Cortes’s men (less than 300 soldiers) enter Tenochtitlan through a causeway. The entire city turns out to greet them. Moctezuma himself puts in an appearance, carried on a litter. He descends from the litter, and Cortes has his first sight of the man who rules the largest and most wondrous city in the known world (the main square was “twice the size of the great square at Salamanca”): his lower lip encrusted with stones in the shape a blue hummingbird, his face adorned with earplug and nose ornaments, surrounded by warriors in jaguar costumes. If self were Cortes, she would have been quaking in her boots!

It seems Moctezuma didn’t know whether to placate the visitors or to finish them off. The Spaniards spent the entire winter in that wondrous city, every moment feeling dread and uncertainty, especially at the sound of the drums beating in the main temple, announcing the start of another human sacrifice. (Yes, why didn’t Moctezuma finish them off? It would have been soooo easy. Even if, as it happens, Cortes’s appearance coincided with the prophecy of the return of the god Quetzalcoatl in the Mayan calendar I-Reed — the Spaniards were dressed in black because it was Good Friday, and black just so happened to be “one of the colors of Quetzalcoatl” — why didn’t Moctezuma just end it all right there? One of the greatest mysteries of history)

When self began reading Conquistadores, she found many parallels between the Spanish “discovery” of the Philippines and the colonization of Cuba and the Caribbean. But starting with the Mexico sections, the tale becomes impossible to categorize: it’s just itself, a great and confounding story. Cortes pulled off one of the greatest “cons” — if not the greatest — of all time.

(To be continued)

Sentence of the Day: Fernando Cervantes

Juan Diaz de Solis, chief pilot on the Spanish expedition to discover the Moluccas Islands, set out in October 1515.

His hopes were raised when he discovered the estuary of the River Plate in 1516, shortly before being tragically captured, along with the majority of his companions, and more than likely eaten by the Guarani Indians.

— Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest, p. 88

Reading About Vasco Nuñez de Balboa’s Route to the Pacific, 1513

The Pacific was a side discovery: what all Spanish explorers were after were “rivers of gold.” In 1 September 1513, an Andalucian explorer named Vasco Nuñez de Balboa set off for Careta in Panama, with a crew of “fewer than 200 men.”

At Careta, “the expedition disembarked and scaled rugged mountain ranges and crossed large rivers, passing through thick, exhausting jungles of a density they had never imagined possible, subduing indigenous people as they went with gunshot and packs of hungry dogs. Finally, in late September 1513, they reached the summit of a bare hill. There, surrounded by his companions — who included a sturdy man from the Extremaduran town of Trujillo called Francisco Pizarro — Nuñez de Balboa was dumbfounded by a sight that was as awesome as it was unexpected. Kneeling down, he raised his hands, gave thanks to God, and ‘prouder than Hannibal showing Italy and the Alps to his soldiers . . . he promised great riches to his men, saying: ‘Behold, all you men who have endured so much, behold the lands of which . . . the natives have told us such wonders.’ In front of them lay the Pacific Ocean.

— Conquistadores: A New History of Spanish Discovery and Conquest, by Fernando Cervantes, pp. 87 – 88

#amreading A Short History of Dublin

Self has a book in her hotel room. She’s been reading from it in drips and drabs. Here’s an excerpt from the section A Brief History of Dublin:

It probably began as a Christian monastic settlement sometime in the 6th century, but by the 9th century it was home to a Viking raider town, which the Vikings themselves called Diflyn. For centuries, a struggle between the Irish and the Viking invaders raged on, until the legendary Irish High King Brian Boru and his army finally defeated them in the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

The next major upheaval for Dublin was the Norman Invasion of Ireland during the late 12th century. By 1171, the Anglo-Normans had taken over the city and it became the capital of the English Lordship of Ireland. Settlers came in great numbers from England and Wales. England’s power was centered around Dublin Castle, and over the next few centuries, Dublin began to develop as an important city, with two cathedrals, several monasteries and by 1592, the beginning of Trinity College.

Best Reads, 2022

K: A Novel, by Ted O’Connell (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2020)

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson (Simon & Schuster, 2011)

Like Water and Other Stories, by Olga Zilberbourg (WTAW Press, 2019)

Your Nostalgia is Killing Me, by John Weir (Red Hen Press, 2022)

The Accomplice, by Joseph Kanon (Atria Books, 2019)

How High We Go In the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu (William Morrow, 2022)