A Trip Through The Chatner Vault: Dressing Like a Boy in Daphne Du Maurier, Eating a Simple Bean, Did You Take Your Pill? and more
My book is due this week please wish me luck finishing! In the meantime please enjoy this trip down memory lane. It is a little daunting, realizing this newsletter is nearly a decade old. Thanks very much for reading (and if you happen to have been subscribing since the early days when it was still called The Shatner Chatner, drop me a line and let me know, won’t you? I’d like to admire you), and see you all next week.
Every time someone dresses like a boy in the novels of Daphne Du Maurier
ARE YOU A PROTAGONIST IN A DAPHNE DU MAURIER NOVEL? DO YOU HAVE A PROBLEM, SUCH AS GOING TO CORNWALL OR A MAN LOOKED AT YOU? PERHAPS YOU STRUGGLE WITH FEMALE RELATIVE OR LIVING NEAR THE SEA?
WHY NOT TRY: “DRESSING LIKE A BOY” ABOUT IT?
CONSIDER “DRESSING LIKE A BOY” FOR ALL YOUR PROBLEM NEEDS: RUDE SERVANTS, DISAPPOINTED CHILDHOOD HOPES, HAVING BROTHERS, 18TH CENTURY, BAD HANDWRITING, ET CETERA. YES, “DRESSING LIKE A BOY” CAN SUIT ALL YOUR PROBLEMS, NO PROBLEM, DON’T DELAY, HANDS IN POCKETS NOW. WHY NOT BE A BOY AND GO TO SEA?
*bolts upright, panicking in cuneiform*
“Kitchen is one wooden spoon, big, one merry fire in hearth, open, jug of herbs in corner, one big pot for stew, always stew, wine bottle cork in no label, yellow butter in crock, a big round bread, knife for holding, little cup, one plate, kitchen is finished. My meal is a potato, big, for a big and simple hunger, my plain hunger by the sea.”
“Life here in France – this French life as we call it here – has changed me. Tiens! And other French words, which I know now and can also speak them. Much tiens. I am a simple man, with a simple life here, my blood becalmed from wars and from my many campaigns, my campagnes. I have here my simple garden, where I grow my single bean, my annual bean. J’suis le legume-homme, vraitment. But yes! A single bean is all now that I need to please my heart. Every year, I take my bean and I grow him, and when he is ready with a fatness, I harvest him, and I cook him up on a big plate for my dinner.”
Wild nights are not your glory: A disappointing visit from Mrs. Whatsit
“I said,” Mrs. Whatsit says, “that there is such a thing as a tesseract. And I’m going on the wildest of adventures imaginable to prove so, and there’ll be ever so much to learn and feel and experience on the way, and glorious creatures that make you shudder in terror and pleasure just to look at, and religious math, and kindly old ladies, and Aunt Beast, and flying, and individualism, and I’m going to rescue science and fatherhood from the grips of conformity, and only the most interesting and clever and unique and overlooked sort of middle-grade readers can come along”—here she fixes her suddenly-steely gaze precisely on you, and you catch your breath—“and I just wanted to stop by and tell you that you can’t come.”
“I don’t understand,” you say.
“Of course you don’t,” Mrs. Whatsit says. “You’re as thick as mud. Perhaps my sisters can get through to you. This is Mrs. Who,” and here she gestures towards a lovely older lady with quiet eyes in a fine emerald cloak who has suddenly appeared beside her.
“How do you do,” you say without thinking.
“How do you do,” Mrs. Who returns. “Behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father’s house.”
“She prefers to speak in quotations,” Mrs. Whatsit explains. “It helps her to access human thought. That quotation meant that you are not important.”
How to win any argument by retreating into your mind palace
Things no one says after being introduced on British quiz shows
“Yeah, I’m really looking forward to this.”
“We’ve, well we’ve been working hard, and we hope to do well today, we’d like that.”
“Thanks, it’s really nice to be on.”
“I like quizzing. To me, it’s not an extravagant sort of punishment.”
“Yeah, we all chose to be here, deliberately, so this is a good thing, and a direct result of choices we’ve made.”
“We’re not embarrassed to be here.”
Remember pill now
A. No, now is yogurt
B. Pill with tea later
C. Is this first tea or later tea?
D. Pill is for leftover nightstand water
I’m Patrick Wilson. I’m your skeptical husband. I’m — Well, I’m just not so sure about all of this
“Listen. It’s me you’re talking to here. Patrick Wilson, your skeptical husband, furrowed brow, forehead high with suspicion, always pinching my eyes to look harder at you. Don’t you know you can trust me? Don’t I know I can trust you? Haven’t we always been in this house together, trusting each other? Haven’t we? Can’t I believe you? Can’t you believe me? Aren’t I your husband, six foot exactly, never had a mustache? You’re so nervous. I believe that.”
The laughter of these masked revelers begins to grow grotesque
“And yet, with the passing of the sun into darkness, and the splitting of her rays into torch-light, do not the shadows stretch forth from the corners of the room, twisting the painted expressions of the partygoers from smile to grimace? Do not these sculpted laughs resemble now a sneer? Can it be that that which was intended to cultivate delight is now fit only to excite disgust, fear, even horror?”
A good reason to join the Puritans in 1600
“I think it must have been a bit like how by January most people start saying they overdid it with holiday parties this year, they went out too much, they’re looking forward to staying in a bit and catching up on movies or reading at home. Perfectly natural reaction to going all-out. Do you have any idea how many parties people had to go to during the late Renaissance? A new festival every day, it sounded like, and you couldn’t just put in an appearance and then go home, you had to participate in the culture of popular laughter all night in order to depressurize social institutions, I’m pretty sure. I couldn’t keep up with it, I’ll tell you that much. The Puritans could certainly have gotten me to at least look at a flyer if they caught me heading home in the small hours after electing some jerk I had to treat like a king for the next fortnight as the Lord of Misrule.
Have you become fed up with being expected to know what the hell is the “carnivalesque”?
Do you agree that there are too many festivals these days?
It’s not just Christmas on Christmas Day anymore —
It’s Christmastide
and before that it’s Advent
and after that it’s Twelfth Night and Epiphanytide
And don’t forget Twelvetide!!! That’s in the mix too
And sometimes it’s not Christmas it’s Yule
OUR PLATFORM IS SIMPLE: NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO PARTY ON A TUESDAY MORNING IN THE DEAD OF WINTER
We are talking 57 straight days of unrelenting parties in the darkest time of year
That means leaving your house every night after sunset.”
I subscribed to the Chatner as soon as I could post-Toast! I also still have my Take To The Sea tote bag.
I have certainly been *reading* since it was the Shatner Chatner, but I can’t remember when I actually became a paid subscriber. Happy anniversary and best of luck finishing the book!