Christmas Stories: The Truce of God

So, it should come as no surprise that I think Mary Roberts Rinehart is awesome. And part of the reason for that is that she’s always at least a little bit surprising. I had no idea what to expect from The Truce of God, her Christmas story, and I’m not altogether sure what I think of it now, but I’m definitely impressed.

First of all, the Truce of God is a pretty cool thing to write about. During the eleventh century, the European nobility  were referred to as “those who fight” (as opposed to “those who work” and “those who pray”), because basically they spent most of their time fighting private wars against their neighbors (or their overlords’ neighbors). The church dealt with this in a few different ways. One was the Crusades. Another was the Truce of God. Basically, the Church said, “Hey, no one is allowed to fight on weekends anymore. Or Thursdays. Or Lent, etc.”  The Catholic Encyclopedia has a little more detail, if you’re interested (in general, it’s a good basic resource for medieval religious history).

How to Analyze People on Sight

For everyone who wishes to judge people by their appearance, here is How to Analyze People on Sight, by Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict.

The Benedicts divide humanity into five types, all of which are full of the most deliciously blatant stereotypes you have ever seen. Fat people enjoy life! “Cerebral” types have large heads! Muscular people like to work, but don’t like to think too hard. Also, they have square jaws. People with a large lung capacity should marry other people with large lungs.

Can you find your type? Tell me how ridiculously invalid the descriptions are!

Orphans of the Storm

So, once upon a time there was this French melodrama called Les deux orphelines. It got made into movies a few times in the 1910s. Then, around 1920, D.W. Griffith was looking for a story to make into his next movie. He’d just had a big success with a beefed-up melodrama, Way Down East, so he decided to use Les deux orphelines and stick it in the middle of the French Revolution. He changed the name to Orphans of the Storm, got Lillian Gish to be in it, and filmed the whole thing in Westchester County. And it was awesome, in spite, or perhaps because, of the frequent references to Bolshevism in the intertitles.

I watched Orphans of the Storm last week on a college TV station, so when the movie ended there were a couple of guys talking about the movie, which is where I came up with the bit about Westchester. They seemed to be more interested in talking about how Griffith’s place in Mamaroneck was called Satan’s Toe than the movie itself. Anyway, this morning I checked Project Gutenberg’s New eBooks feed and found that they’d uploaded the novelization of the movie, also called Orphans of the Storm and full of pictures from the movie. I have not read it yet, and I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it, but I thought it was a very nifty thing and I wanted to share it.

Her Kingdom

Objectively, I’m pretty sure that Her Kingdom, by Amy Le Feuvre, is a terrible book.But it’s also old and fat and printed on thick, soft paper, and really nice to curl up on the couch with when the weather is beginning to get cool.

Anstice Barrett’s father has just died, leaving her almost penniless. She goes to her elderly cousin Lucy for advice, and Lucy tells her to marry Justin Holme, who is a bitter widower with three uncontrollable children. This is a totally ridiculous idea, made more so by the fact that Justin is only home about two months out of each year, that his house is in a very rural area, and also that Justin hates women. It’s so ridiculous that the only reason Amy Le Feuvre can come up with to have Anstice accept the offer is to that she’s haunted by a dream of drowning children. Or something.

Happy House

I read Jane Abbott’s Happy House for the first time in May. It’s different from the other Abbott books I’ve read in that it’s aimed at a slightly older audience, and also in that…well, it seems a bit more formulaic. But I like it a lot.

The main character is a girl who has just graduated from college. Her name is Anne Leavitt, and so is that of her best friend, but the protagonist is usually called Nancy. The two Anne Leavitts, along with their other best friend, Claire, are packing when a porter arrives with a letter addressed to one of the Annes — they’re not sure which. After reading the invitation from Sabrina Leavitt to her niece, they conclude that it belongs to Anne, not Nancy, but Anne is just about to leave for Russia to do something vaguely humanitarian, so she persuades Nancy to go in her place.

Happy Captain Blood Day!

So, September 19th is the day Peter Blood is sentenced to slavery in Barbados — if he’d been tried any sooner, he would have just been sentenced to death, instead of having the opportunity to become the coolest pirate ever. So you should celebrate, preferably by reading — or rereading — some Sabatini. Here are a few suggestions.

I cannot express how much I hate Philo Vance right now.

I don’t know why I keep putting myself through this. I loathe Philo Vance. I mean, S.S. Van Dine is hilarious in his insistence on always using the longest word available and out-footnoting everyone on the face of the earth, but even run-on sentences about “the lepidoptera of our café life” cannot make up for the hatefulness that is Philo Vance.

Stammering, Its Cause and Cure

I kind of want to quote all of the prefatory material from Stammering, Its Cause and Cure, because it just gets better and better. I mean, the title is pretty great, for starters. Then the author, Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue, is described as “A Chronic Stammerer for Almost Twenty Years; Originator of the Bogue Unit Method of Restoring Perfect Speech; Founder of the Bogue Institute for Stammerers and Editor of the “Emancipator,” a magazine devoted to the Interests of Perfect Speech.” Then there’s a dedication to his mother, “that wonderful woman whose unflagging courage held me to a task that I never could have completed alone and who when all others failed, stood by me, encouraged me and pointed out the heights where lay success.”

Then there’s the table of contents, which starts with “Part I–My Life as a Stammerer,” and contains such sections as “A Stammerer Hunts a Job,” and “Can Stammering be Cured by Mail.”

The book seems to be among other things, an advertisement encouraging parents to send their stammering children to the Bogue Institute, which is presided over by Mr. Bogue and his mother.

No offense to anyone with a speech defect, of course, and I’m sure Mr. Bogue had the best of intentions and possibly even some success, but…”these experiences, however, were valuable to me, even though they were costly, for they taught me a badly-needed lesson, to wit: That drugs and medicines are not a cure for stammering. “

Books I have neglected to post about since finishing The Girl From Hollywood

I keep wanting to do a post about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ book The Girl from Hollywood, and how an absolutely appalling series of coincidences gets three different women involved with an evil movie director named, if I recall correctly, Wilson Crumb. One gets addicted to cocaine and becomes a drug dealer (although he cannot get her to sleep with him);another gets addicted to cocaine, becomes his mistress, and dies of pnuemonia after he hits her; and one, after semi-successfully fending off his advances, shoots herself. The two drug-addicted ones are in love with the same young man, who lives on a ranch modeled after Burroughs’ own, and the attempted suicide is his sister. His name is Custer, and he spends a while in jail for murder. It’s all pretty miserable. If I had no interest in reading the Tarzan books before, I really don’t now.

Anyway: things I have read since The Girl From Hollywood, and liked better:

I kind of thought I’d posted this last week, but apparently not: Red-Robin

After finding Keineth so wonderful, I immediately started two more Jane Abbott books: Larkspur on my computer and Red-Robin on my Kindle. Red-Robin is the one I finished first — I don’t know whether that was because I was reading it on the more portable machine or because it was kind of awesome.

Somehow, Red-Robin seemed a lot older than it was, which I think might be because the storyline reminded me a lot of a Mary Jane Holmes novel. But even though Jane Abbott uses the same plotlines so many other people use, she brings a sort of freshness to them. Things that you expect to happen because you know how the story goes do happen, but they happen more naturally and spontaneously than you would believe possible.