Mayan ruins, the Bible, Lord Peter, flippancy, fantasy, and fried chicken
Weekly digest, July 19, 2025
Welcome to the many new subscribers this week. Let me start this weekend’s digest with a brief reintroduction of myself: I’m a native of northeast Georgia and an alumnus of Clemson University, and teach History at a college in South Carolina.
I also write fiction: three novels and two novellas so far. For lack of a better label I call them historical fiction, though it’s not of the romance-in-funny-clothes variety. (I have a fourth novel, my longest and most ambitious, in the revisions stage.) Please do check them out, and if you like what you read, leave a review on Amazon, Goodreads, or another place readers congregate.
I launched this Substack in January as a weekly digest or newsletter, a way to share anything I find interesting or entertaining during the week—usually but not always about history, literature, and “culture” broadly construed—updates on my work, and the latest from my blog, which I’ve maintained since late 2017. I plan to branch out in what I share here sometime this year or next.
In the meantime, thanks for subscribing to Quid! I hope y’all will find something interesting to read here.
Apropos
Two passages this week. First, dreams:
The great Southern diarist of [Robert E Lee’s] day, Mary Chesnut, tells us that when a lady teased him about his ambitions, “[h]e remonstrated—said his tastes were of the simplest. He only wanted a Virginia farm—no end of cream and fresh butter—and fried chicken. Not one fried chicken or two—but unlimited fried chicken.”
—from Robert E Lee, by Roy Blount Jr
Second, reality:
Public affairs go on pretty much as usual: perpetual chicanery and rather more personal abuse than there used to be.
—John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, April 17, 1826
What’s going on
Of interest
has started a Substack! Check out his first essay on what sets fantasy apart from all other genres, the “sidewaysness” of its perspective on what is and isn’t possible, how to make the fantastical believable, and how to avoid killing the reader’s willingness to believe. Important considerations, because “science fiction and fantasy have intrinsic credulity problems. You want readers to vicariously experience the stories, but the situations in the stories are impossible.” A favorite aside:
I was on a panel about vampire stories one time, and one of the panelists said, “Well you know, Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th century women.” And I said, “No, it’s actually about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood. Don’t take my word for it, check it out.”
Hear hear.
At The Hedgehog Review, David Polansky compares and contrasts the violence of two great Westerns coincidentally published the same year, 1985: Lonesome Dove and Blood Meridian:
Both were self-consciously composed in the shadow of the Western genre’s decline. Both were well-researched works featuring a combination of invented and historical figures. Both novels offer a deliberately unromantic portrait of the American West, involving graphic displays of frontier violence. And in different ways, both novels are concerned with how the frontier exposes people for what they truly are.
I think in comparing these two it’s extremely important that each takes places where and especially when they do. The essay acknowledges this obliquely but 1840s filibusters and scalphunters in the deserts of northern Mexico live in a different world from retired lawmen and cowboys in post-Civil War Texas.
Archaeology news: A husband and wife team from the University of Houston have uncovered a probable royal tomb in the Mayan city of Caracol in Belize:
A cremation that was placed in the center of Caracol’s Northeast Acropolis plaza and dated to the year 350 through radiocarbon dating, it turns out, contains artifacts from central Mexico, including knives and obsidian blades. Also included was a carved atlatl projectile tip that is typical for a Teotihuacan warrior but not commonly connected with the Maya. Not only that: the cremation itself, and its placement in a residential plaza, are practices more closely associated with the Teotihuacan people, not Maya.
The Chases’ conclusion is that the main cremated individual was likely a Caracol royal family member who had adopted central Mexican ritual practices, possibly one who had lived in Teotihuacan as a Maya envoy.
Archaeology is tricky that way. The “stuff we find in the dirt,” as I describe it to students, doesn’t explain itself. In the meantime, this is your cue to reread Charles Portis’s Gringos.
Screwtape does not want Wormwood to assume that all laughter is equally useful to the Civil Service Below, however, and divides the causes of human laughter into what I have dubbed “The Four Laughs”: Joy, Fun, the Joke Proper, and Flippancy.
I wrote specifically about Screwtape and flippancy some years ago here.
Andrew Ferguson reviews Dave Barry’s new memoir Class Clown. He begins with a consideration of just how difficult it actually is to pull off what Barry did for decades. Genuinely, consistently funny newspaper “humor” has always been vanishingly rare, and Barry makes it look easy.
At The Critic, Sebastian Milbank reviews Alexander Douglas’s Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self, a book that crossed my radar a few months ago but have read little about. Milbank finds it intriguing but flawed, raising important questions without adequately answering all of them.
Earlier this week
looked at the complicated textual history of the Bible and some of the oddities that result from the myriad manuscript families and textual traditions. Here’s one I remember noticing as a kid:More popular, at least in terms of sales, is the Textus Receptus, first compiled by Erasmus from later Greek/Byzantine manuscripts. It’s the basis for the King James Bible and the New King James Version. This leads to an amusing observation: Protestant fundamentalists who insist on using only the King James are championing an English version of a Greek Orthodox Bible first edited by a Roman Catholic monk. Providence plays its jokes.
Lots of good book recommendations in the conclusion as well.
At his blog, Alan Jacobs has a great short post about the man whom Dorothy Sayers thought “the perfect Peter Wimsey,” Balliol College chaplain Maurice Roy Ridley. (A younger Sayers, upon first seeing Ridley: “isn’t it a killing name, like the hero of a six-penny novelette?”)
Jacobs notes that the association with Wimsey went to Ridley’s head, as he was already prone to vanity:
one of his pupils reported that he had a bust of Dante on the mantel over his fireplace and would stand next to it, posing in such a way that the resemblance between him and the great Florentine poet was clear to all observers[.]
Some funny bits and nice surprises here.
At Law & Liberty, Theodore Dalrymple looks at the graduate projects of architectural students and the arrogance they reveal:
All the projects are of free-standing constructions, without the need, or indeed the possibility, of cohering with what already exists. Every project is incompatible with anything except itself. Each is a city unto itself, as if the world began with the student whose project it is. As to its aesthetics, not a word is spoken.
The absence of aesthetic evaluation is also evident in most contemporary architectural criticism. Words such as innovative, playful, energy efficient, unprecedented, and so forth are bandied about, without mention that what is being described is hideously awful and will look even worse within a couple of years, when the impossibility or expense of maintenance makes itself felt.
Related: here on Substack,
considers the question of why every place has the same glass-box skyscrapers now and examines the endangered diversity of vernacular architecture: “what if buildings were instead rooted in local traditions, and shaped by the needs, culture, and climate of a particular region?”On YouTube,
looks at the ways the internet is getting consistently worse through the frame of Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification,” a term first brought to my attention by Alan Jacobs here.The latest on the blog
I’m working on a review of a novella that successfully pulls off the revelation that “it was all a dream.” I considered under what conditions this revelation actually works instead of—as it so often does—feeling like a cheat.
Having recently rewatched The Poseidon Adventure for the first time since childhood, I called Gene Hackman’s Rev Scott a Gary Stu and reflected on the role of vulnerability in making characters compelling.
From the blog archives
Last summer I wrote about dramatic irony and how this marvelous storytelling tool is used and abused.
Related to The Poseidon Adventure’s Gary Stu hero: A few years ago I looked at the only way to make James Bond boring.
From three years ago today: CS Lewis, in his Cambridge inaugural lecture “De Descriptione Temporum,” discusses historical periodization.
Currently reading
The Oceans and the Stars, by Mark Helprin
Sidney Reilly: Master Spy, by Benny Morris
The Hobbit, by JRR Tolkien
Prayer for Beginners, by Peter Kreeft
Recently acquired
Five Decembers, by James Kestrel
Vikings Pocket Museum, by Steve Ashby and Alison Leonard
Empire of Silence, by Christopher Ruocchio (thanks, Chet!)
Until next time
Again, welcome to all new subscribers, and thanks to everyone for reading!