J.M.W Turner's Slave Ship
Yes, I’ve finally decided to go ahead and write that adventure game about DIY I’ve had gestating in my brain for the last three years. Or not. The Shelfquest is an unnecessarily epic name for the task I set myself once I’d graduated from uni, of reading every single book in my room that I haven’t yet read. Why? I don’t know. Maybe it was some kind of weird withdrawal from not having six different reading lists to keep up with during my degree. Probably it’s because I have slight sadomasochistic tendencies and love a challenge.
Anyway, seeing as I’m forever trying to think what to use this blogspace for, I’m going to blog my Shelfquest. That doesn’t mean reviewing each book – I’ve learnt from trying to keep a theatre reviews blog that I don’t have the patience to constantly write good reviews. Nope, instead I’ll just offer random nuggets of interest I gleaned from the book in question.
I’ve just finished reading a Hugh Thomas’s mammoth account of the slave trade called, rather handily, The Slave Trade. Very long (800+ pages) and very history-ey. It was quite hard work, and I did skim a lot of it, but I figured that since I had a book on such an important historical event mysteriously lying in my room, I ought to try and digest as much of it as possible. For a book that wasn’t a novel (and therefore not my usual preference) I really enjoyed some of the language, mostly from the excellent primary sources that Thomas drew on in his research.
Some nuggets:
Portuguese slavers describing one of their own as being so vile and immoral that they thought he had “hairs on his heart”. Lovely.
Samuel Eliot Morison writing in praise of American clipper vessels:
Their architects, like poets who transmute nature’s message into song, obeyed what wind and wave have taught them, to create the noblest of all sailing vessels and the most beautiful creations of man in America…. They were our Gothic cathedrals, our Parthenon.
A biblical quotation: “Though hand join in hand, the wicked shall not got unpunished” (Proverbs 11:21).
An old English term for kidnapped or stolen: “panyared”.
Words I looked up: ephemeral, filibustering, secession.
Things which were referenced about which I know very little: Manifest Destiny, the Mexican Caste War, the Crimean War.
(A quick Wikipedia search for “Manifest Destiny” yielded the discovery of this painting by John Gast, which is just crying out for the satirist’s brush. I wonder what Banksy would make of it…).
Next up now that I’ve finally finished The Slave Trade (it took me almost three months): Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta. Goody!
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My Shakespeare-sense (Shakesense?) is tingling! A new movie is in development based on the graphic novel Julius, by Antony Johnston. It’s essentially Julius Caesar, updated to the modern day and set in the London criminal underworld. There’s a five-page preview of the comic available here. This could be good, even if the movie sucks (I hope it doesn’t, but The Negotiator, Be Cool and The Italian Job remake is a rather mixed bag from the director). I’ll have to try and get hold of it.
