I’m not sure what gundam is but I don’t think it’s a book and in fact from context clues it sounds like anime
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So to flesh out the Gerusalemme Liberata connection, the story is an epic romance focused on the liberation of Jerusalem, in theory the events of the first crusade but actually historical fiction made up around it. You have two sides, one the Christian invaders, the other a sort of paganish interpretation of the Muslim defenders.
It’s really hard for me to summarize from memory. If you look at the Wikipedia article, you’ll see so many of the setpieces depicted in art, and that’s my reading experience: it’s beautiful, exquisite setpieces with wild story swings that both Edmund Spenser and John Milton clearly took inspiration from. In short, the Christian knights like Tancred and Rinaldo try to besiege Jerusalem but encounter things like a forest enchanted against them, the valorous female knight Clorinda, the Princess Erminia, and a witch called Armida. All three of those women fall in love with Tancred or Rinaldo and convert to Christianity, but not before a lot of wild action.
For instance, Armida tries to kill Rinaldo but ends up falling in love with him. He pulls an Odysseus and forgets the Crusade completely. Then two of Rinaldo’s friends basically try to save him (cf. Lancelot saving Galahad from the Castle Anthrax) by bringing a diamond mirror to force Rinaldo to see what, in this sixteenth century text, is coded as the antithesis of masculine chivalry: feminine-coded excess of pleasure. His sword, his phallic symbol, is a toy:
"Upon the lucid glass his eyes he roll’d,
And all his delicacy saw; his dress,
Breathing rich odors, how it gleam’d with gold!
How trimly curl’d was each lascivious tress!
And with what lady-like luxuriousness
His ornamented sword address’d his side!
So wrapp’d with flowers it swung, that none could guess
If 'twas a wounding weapon, or applied
As a fantastic toy, voluptuous eyes to pride
As one by heavy sleep in bondage held,
Comes to himself when the long dream takes flight,
So woke the youth when he himself beheld,
Nor could endure the satire of the sight:
Down fell his looks; and instantly, in spite
Of recollected pride, the color came
Across his face;-in this embarrass’d plight,
A thousand times he wish’d himself in flame,
Ocean, in earth, th’ abyss, to shun the glowing shame." (Canto XVI, stanzas 30-31).
It’s a fascinating study of a specific mode of literature that threads together a narrative of war with both a ton of sensuality and messy attempts to make things so tempting, so luxurious in description, conform to a Christian ideal. It’s easy to read the two cantos before what I described and conclude the text is not simply rejecting what Rinaldo rejects in his reflection: the seductions of Armida are described both second-hand (the narrator retelling what a sage says about her) and then first-hand, with a lot of detail about her tresses, her beauty, her mannerisms, and (in my translation) how she [verb] wanton’d about. No wonder artists made a lot of hot art about this text.
I definitely got off track and didn’t connect this back to Mobile Suit Gundam. So I’ll just end by saying that, as rambling as I may make Gerusalemme Liberata seem (and it is that), it’s actually one of the more focused epic romances at only 20 cantos. They do actually end in a way that kind of makes sense. And Clorinda is probably a bit like Lalah Sune. OK, done.
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that’s a great post, it made me want to read it. @Taliesin_Merlin were you a medieval etc studies major or is this pure love of the game? not that it can’t be both
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thank you for staying on topic
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ever come across this story?
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That is a cool way to put it. Which translation did you read? The one I’ve read the first section of so of was by Anthony Esolen who also did imo a pretty good version of Dante. I’m interested in the old Edward Fairfax translation if I ever do really get to it.
Also: Any thoughts / experience on the other Italian epics? I’ve had Ariosto on the shelf forever but never really dug in. And I know exactly one guy who swears by Boiardo, but also have somehow never committed to really trying him.
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Thank you, @MoH! I studied medieval and early modern literature with a focus on romance.
@rearnakedwindow, my quote came from a 19th century translation by J. H. Wiffen. I first read it in Max Wickert’s Oxford Classics translation, read the Wiffen translation a few years later, and I read small portions of Carew and Fairfax out of curiosity. I liked Fairfax a lot!
So the other Italian epic in my reading list is Orlando Furioso. I like it at least as much, even though Tasso thought it was less focused as an epic. Bradamante (the female knight of this epic) is consistently awesome, as is Ruggiero, the Saracen knight she falls in love with. She saves him from an enchanted castle of iron, for instance. (It helps they are the purported ancestors of Ariosto’s patron.) Orlando falls in love with someone who doesn’t reciprocate his love (Angelica), the solution to which involves traveling to the Moon. It has a lot going on, and if it’s easy to lose track of a single story, the energy of its scenes keeps me going.
I never read Boiardo save for maybe a short excerpt.
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i hadn’t read that chicago mag story, but i do know about bennet braun et al. i read the article–it is sad and i’m impressed how pat burgus was seemingly able to find peace after the ordeal. i doubt i’d have been able to do the same.
it’s very strange to look back at the satanic panic. i wouldn’t be surprised to read a thorough history of it in a few years and see jolly west’s name come up more than a few times.
Treasure Island is pretty good.
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yes indeed. The Ebb-Tide and of course The Weir of Hermiston too idk how much RLS you’ve read
I don’t really know what to think about this stuff. On the one hand, the general public can probably spin up paranoid conspiracies organically (especially now that we have the internet) without much need for psyops. And examples like the Mirage Men shit or mkuktra: I mean these are government functionaries with a budget and offices and employees etc so of course some of them get up to weird shit given time and opportunity. A similar thing to gladio conspiracies where is it just the fruits of arming and organizing cadres of violent right wingers and them whipping themselves up with prosaic nationalistic and/or petty criminal schemes enabled by same said time/opportunity/budget? What I mean to ask is are there grander and far seeing conspiracies at work vs the dots people try to connect are in fact only isolated super structural manifestations of the same 20th century anti-communist base? Not an expert but I usually favor the latter but then you remember that jolly west visited jack ruby in prison seriously what was up with that
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the more i learn, the less i know. i think a problem with most conspiratorial thinking is the inability to abide convergence and contradiction, i.e. the cognitive dissonance required to admit two things can be true at once. in this case, for pure rhetorical example, it’s quite possible psychiatrists were acting under their own unadulterated yet no less evil ways while some government agency was also conducting their own experiments with false memory.
i agree with you that gladio is a great rosetta stone for much of what we call conspiracy: g-men with too much autonomy, too little sense, and too big an ego setting things in motion they can’t control with the cover-up compounding and confounding the issue (what i believe happened with jfk can also be explained in this way). there’s also something to be said about how the early architects of the cia like dulles and james jesus angleton saw themselves: poets, masters of craft, white shoed blue bloods. with hubris, they did think they could shape the world in their image, and i think this genealogy explains what we still see (or don’t see) happening today even if the quantity has somewhat changed the quality–they don’t have as clear a directive as “anti-communism” anymore, which makes things harder to explain (maybe by design?) but yes, don’t attribute malice to what could be contributed to incompetence, but don’t attribute happenstance to what could be incompetent machinations.
on a broader point and returning to my earlier rhetorical example of two convergent, contradictory streams–even if psychologists were working independently from an agency in planting false memories, were they not serving the same goal? the goal of serving power, obtaining control, avarice, and individualism? i would argue yes, and this is why i say i’m interested in conspiracy on an allegorical level. this is also my cop-out answer to your question asking if there is something grander at work or if it’s just features of the super structure. both!
hopefully i’m not showing too much of my hand here as a crazy person, but when i get really deep into conspiracies, i find myself questioning the nature of reality, what can be known, power, fate, and other things that could be described as metaphysical. i’ve never done psychedelic drugs, but i imagine it’s something similar in that eventually you get to a point where things can only be inferred and not spoken. things seem at once both laughably ineffectual and terrifyingly serious. in other words, yes the people who serve power and their minions are small, fragile, and broken people. but they also have the power to inflict real harm and have done so.
to that point–i was reading a book on timothy mcveigh and learned his defense counsel contracted jolly west! this is not even to mention his connections with both jfk, rfk, charles manson, and jonestown. and what do we think happened after jolly west died? did his “technique” die on the vine with him? who’s to say, as i think mythmaking is part of the game.
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It’s been a while!
My list definitely would be quite the normie number indeed. I basically didn’t read anything outside of academic requirements between around 2009 and last year, so I feel like my picks are skewed super heavily to childhood/teenage selections or things I’ve read so recently; I’m not sure how much they will stand the test of time. I’ll have a think about it but some surefire picks would include Lord of the Flies, The Hobbit, A Clockwork Orange, One Flew Over the Cucco’s Nest, Wuthering Heights.
I really rapidly lost steam reading The Vampire Lestat recently even though I enjoyed Interview and remembered Lestat being better when I read it as a teenager. So vamps have gone on the backburner for now.
I’ve recently been going hard on fantasy after said stint in vampire fiction. Some of the series i’ve been reading are:
Summary
Crown of Stars by Kate Elliott
I ended up taking a break after finishing book 3 of 7 and honestly don’t know if I’ll continue with the series. Elliott does some incredibly rich world-building, with lots of political machinations and intriguing plotlines. However, the long-windedness of the story eventually stated to take it’s toll and I started to find myself at the end of the third book disliking more of the character POV sections than liking them.
One particular plotline started to really grate on my personal preferences, which was:
When one of our key protagonists Liath ends up with Prince Sanglant and then quickly falls pregnant and has a baby. It happens quite abruptly and as a reader I thought the tension between them was going to be a whole-series thing. I personally just find that pregnancy storylines often limit the focus of a character to “being pregnant” as their key character trait. Note that Rosemary’s Baby is a book I adore so I know pregnancy storylines can be done well, but this is an example of where it ruined her characterisation for me a bit.
His Dark Materials by Phillip Pullman
This was a childhood favourite and so a re-read about 20 years after my most recent read of it. While some of the magic was lost over time, I still thought it was a fantastic series for young people. Shed a tear at Lee Scoresby’s last moments with Hester.
Kushiel’s Dart by Jacqueline Carey
This is a weird one, because it’s kind of pitched as a romance book particularly with it’s terrible cover but is actually more like a political thriller with a few BDSM scenes and no romance. The main character is a courtesan, but her role in society is more akin to a religious figure than a mistress or sex worker. It oddly works for what it is but some people may not love the purple prose. I’ll probably read the other two in the trilogy at some point but I wasn’t rushing to jump into book 2.
The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman
This was a stand-alone but a prequel book is on it’s way. I rated Buehlman’s horror fantasy Between Two Fires very highly, so I went into Blacktongue with pretty high expectations. While I didn’t like it as much as Between Two Fires, I found the protagonist’s narration funny and charming enough to read through it over a couple of days. A decent recommendation for people who like the pulpy feel of a lot of '70s fantasy.
The First Law by Joe Abercrombie
Currently I’m about a third of the way through book 3. This seems like a highly praised but also divisive series, and I wasn’t sure where I was personally going to land. I read a bit of The Blade Itself about ten years ago but bounced off it because I just wasn’t in the mindframe to read a novel. I’m so glad I went back to this series because I am thoroughly enjoying it. Unlike other multiple POV series, every time as a reader I switch to the next character I’m excited to see where it goes. It definitely is scratching the “I can’t wait to finish work so I can pick it up again” itch.
I have a hard time not planning my next book/series when I’m close to finishing a current read, but just trying to wait and see what the vibe i’m feeling is when I need to pick up something new. But I’ll probably go with something weird as a palate-cleanser.
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I don’t think it’s the same goal, no. I think in the case of braun this is more of someone pursuing professional advancement by corralling a particular clinical niche, and it just happens to be a paranoid vein he mined. I don’t think there’s more to it than that. With the caveat that hey you never know, I don’t think there’s a behold a pale horse type new world order grand conspiracy because
I don’t think even this is a meaningfully achievable goal, despite whatever intentions and efforts may have been or are being made. I think the contemporary tech assholes are kind of the same: sociopathic dorks who are empowered, such as they are, by their own wealth and by being positioned as conduits of the interests of the wealthy, to try to enact their will, but they’re just going to fail and the rest of us will be left to deal with the results of their essentially greedy and egotistical preoccupations.
yes certainly this is the case, but I tend to think it’s the entire case, which is the thing. I’m not really arguing against some versions of the true existence of some of the commonly received conspiracy theories, but the allegorical value I wonder.
This feeds into some of the dissatisfaction I’ve experienced with lots of “weird” fiction and “extreme” horror: what is actually being portrayed here that realism does not
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you’re misunderstanding my point, but that’s okay because we’re in agreement. i just didn’t make myself clear enough.
when i say men like braun (i.e. those acting independently) and people attempting to orchestrate conspiracies have the same goal in mind, i don’t mean that they are in cahoots and there’s a master plan, but rather they are greedy, vile, misguided, and ultimately tragic people who want to serve power in its many forms. their goals are elemental to the human condition, in other words.
likewise, i agree that both types of people are on a fool’s errand in what they believe they can do. dulles and his ilk especially are laughable and pathetic failures. it would be funny if they didn’t leave a trail of literal bodies and otherwise ruined lives in their wake. instead, it’s sad. centuries of half-cooked foiled plans and for what? this? i’d even argue the world would have continued unabated in this direction should no one have tried to meddle! as you mentioned earlier, people don’t need much help to act the way we do on our own.
so i guess when i say i find allegorical value in this stuff that’s what i mean. even if you don’t “believe” in it, it’s a way of viewing the illusions and abuse of power, human failings, and modern life. but also why would you not believe most of it.
kinda counter to and kind of in line with what i’m saying above, i’d really recommend the book the jakarta method as it kinda cuts both ways in showing the cia and other powers can sometimes give the boulder a little push before inertia takes care of the rest. i’m sure you’ve seen the ways of killing movie, though i’m not sure how deep it goes into the particulars.
I’m not disagreeing in principle, I’m just trying to think through examples of books making use of these kinds of conspiracy theories that have the effect you describe and I’m coming up short. For as engrossing as it can be, the device has to stay suggestive and never resolve into focus, and I’ve come to find that frustrating since landing on something like an understanding what the “reality” is. I’m not sure I find the effect illuminating. Again, I’m not saying it’s not engrossing and interesting, but is the static explanatory. I should clarify I’m thinking of the more woo kind of conspiracy theory here: I don’t think of the events recounted in The Jakarta Method as part of this since that’s a pretty open and shut case of material conflict
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i don’t know if there’s a single book that combines both of the types of conspiracy theories (though that seems like less and less of a useful word to describe the sorts of things we’re talking about). speaking for myself, it’s just a feeling i get from reading respectable investigative history, completely noided shit, and everything in between. the reason why i don’t think there’s a perfect book in that regard is everything fails in at least one of those areas, though i could probably put together a list of books i think are worthwhile if anyone is interested.
i should also add that i find the woo kind of theories (nice touch) are interesting and fit into my holistic view even if they are off the wall and full schizo because they still say something, much like this photo:
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Yeah I mean my point is that if the common ground understanding is the basis and ultimate result is basically commonplace (if exceptional in scale and capacity) greed and cruelty making dead women, children, and elderly people then how does the suggestive and paranoid treatment attend to this effectively, is it a kind of stylization liable for critique along the same lines stylized violence is criticized (and for that matter, possibly fun and engaging stylization in the same way).
Anyhow somewhat related I started reading The Occult Sciences in the City of Buenos Aires which is Roberto Arlt’s first book (published when he was 20). It’s got that energy of his but nothing so far other than basic reporting and explication of a number of pretty familiar theosophists. Of interest for some connections to The Mad Toy. Waiting for my copies of “Trescientos millones” and “Saverio, el cruel”so I can start trying to translate those.
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I’ve been reading Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind for a while. The good thing about it is that I can take as many long breaks as I like and still feel completely lost as if I hadn’t.
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good question. all i can say is that the different turns and manifestations of power/cruelty/evil are equal parts terrifying and evocative for me.