What is a civet cat?

According to Paula R. Backscheider, "in the early 1690s Daniel Defoe invested in highly speculative ventures such as civet cats and a diving bell." Evidently, Defoe lost a large sum of his fortune to these ventures.

What I want to know is. . .


what is a civet cat?

And how could this creature be considered an investment? Do they dive for fish or something?

***
PS- It turns out a civet cat may be a cousin to the racoon or one of these.

Dude, Defoe. Did you think the civet cat would be sweeping the nation with its popularity as a house pet? Dude.

Worshipping Temple

I just read Sir William Temple's "An Essay Upon an Ancient and Modern Learning" and found it amazing. Many of the examples and topics that Temple addresses are ongoing in academia today. For example, Temple discusses how wealth and power become detrimental to learning and knowledge acquisition. He states:

It is no wonder then, that learning has been so little advanced since it grew to be mercenary, and the progress of it has been fettered by the cares of the world, and disturbed by the desires of being rich, or the fears of being poor.

What I find most upsetting about academia today is its obsession with money. Administrators want profits and students want high paying jobs. I would say that faculty want to get paid, but their salaries are so low, this would be a rather moot point. When higher education becomes involved with wealth, we're in for a world of trouble. Folks only want what is profitable, which isn't always what's best. As a civilization, we will pay the price, so to speak.

Did Locke just make a funny?

Per John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

Wake a man out of a sound sleep, and ask him what he was that moment thinking of. If he himself be conscious of nothing he then thought on, he must be a notable diviner of thoughts that can assure him that he was thinking. May he not, with more reason, assure him he was not asleep? This is something beyond philosophy; and it cannot be less than revelation, that discovers to another thoughts in my mind, when I can find none there myself. And they must needs have a penetrating sight who can certainly see that I think, when I cannot perceive it myself, and when I declare that I do not; and yet can see that dogs or elephants do not think, when they give all the demonstration of it imaginable, except only telling us that they do so. This some may suspect to be a step beyond the Rosicrucians; it seeming easier to make one's self invisible to others, than to make another's thoughts visible to me, which are not visible to himself.

Okay. So, the setup may be long, but was this comment a little jab at those fiesty Rosicrucians? Hmmm. Maybe I need more sleep.

How did they know?

According to J.M. Armistead, Restoration playwright Nathaniel Lee lived well for a brief period of time: "The signs of high living were becoming visible in his growing paunch and red nose."

Is he basing this on portraits? How the hell does he know that Lee had a red nose??

Pilgrim's Progress. . . I get it, okay?

I can see why Pilgrim's Progress is so widely read. You've got action, adventure, a pilgrim named Christian, allegory. . . what more can a person want in religious material??? Bunyan even kills off a major minor character!

I assume that our contemporary version of Pilgrim's Progress would be those freaky VeggieTales. I know nothing about these guys, but I distrust computer animated TV shows. They just creep me out. And a bunch of anthropomorphic vegetables spouting off on morality and religion seems unappetizing. I mean, if vegetables are getting anthropomorphized, what the hell are we going to eat?

At least Christian kicks some devil ass. . . I doubt VeggieTales does. I seriously doubt it.

Porn vs. Political Satire

What made John Wilmot, the 2nd Earl of Rochester, hot? It's not a question of whether he was hot or not because he clearly was HOT!
Was it for his dirty ditties? Or was it his sharp satiric edge? Or...

Was it his lovable smirk?
Look at that adorable monkey!

After I saw that terrible film, The Libertine, I can't help but imagine Johnny Depp reading to me every time I read Rochester's poetry. I mean, Johnny Depp would be the ideal image of what we would WANT Rochester to be like.

Yet, I think our contemporary version of Rochester would be Stavros Niachros. Or Paris Hilton. Blah.

Perhaps we should return to the idealization of true wit and leave behind the slutty twit.

Or maybe we should all go out and buy ourselves a pet monkey. . . Nah.

One more for prose...

George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham is also pro-prose:

• Let’s have, at least, once in our lives, a time/When we may hear some reasen, not all Rhyme:/We have these ten years felt it’s Influence;/Pray let this prove a year of Prose and Sence.

Yet, his play The Rehearsal is a mismash of all sorts of awfully rhymed couplets and verse. And why not? He's mocking the pompous John Dryden, the one guy we still read in undergrad classes today. If only Buckingham wrote more in verse. . .

I ought to keep a tally of everyone that's for prose versus rhyme. I'm pretty sure the pro-prosers are winning this game.

On the whole, The Rehearsal would be a great play to re-adapt for a modern audience. It would simply take someone bold enough to make fun of a contemporary film or tv director. . . We could take jabs at Martin Scorsese awful editing or Oliver Stone's heavy handedness. Take that!

George Etherege is ril, ril funny

Harriet from The Man of Mode is one of my favourite female characters in a Restoration play. She's pretty, fiesty and down to earth. She can match, if not excel, in wit against Dorimant. I suppose many female roles were like this at the time, but I particularly like her because she reminds me of Harriet from So I Married an Axe Murderer. Here are a few of my favourite lines:

• Women then ought to be no more fond of dressing than Fools should be of talking; Hoods and Modesty, Masques and Silence, things that shadow and conceal; they should think of nothing else.
• Varnish'd over with good breeding, many a Blockhead makes a tolerable show.

Now, let's compare her to Harriet from SIMAM:
...

Okay, so I can't think of anything super witty from her... but that is simply because she was upstaged by Mike Meyers. Well, I suppose that Harriet from MoM wins this battle... for now.

There's nothing funny about Milton

Nonetheless, Milton's Paradise Lost is fantastic. I can't imagine why I would need to state something so obvious, but then I recalled what it was like to be a Freshman again.

I'm about a third of the way through and will be finished later tonight. Here are my favorite tidbits thus far:

• This neglect then of Rhyme so little is to e taken for a defect, though it may seem so perhaps to vulgar Readers, tat it rather is to be esteem’d an example set, the first in English, of ancient liberty recover’d to Heroic Poem from the troublesome and modern bondage of Rhyming.

Rhyme seems to be this argument that keeps surfacing among writers like Robert Howard, Dryden, and Milton. Howard says that rhyme ruins the spontaneity and vulgarity that we love so much in Restoration theatre. Dryden says a big screw you to Howard and writes Conquest of Granada in verse. Milton says a big screw y'all to everyone and writes Paradise Lost in blank verse, sans rhyme of course.

• Of Man’s First disobedience, and the Fruit/Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste/Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,/

Yeah. This needs no introduction. If you have no idea where this comes from, open the text up to page 1.

• Long is the way/And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light

A famous line made even more famous to the popular masses by what contemporary film? I will give you a virtual cookie if you get it right.

• Towards him they bend/With awful reverence prone; and as a God/Extol him equal to the highest in Heav’n.

If you were to take anything from Paradise Lost, and there is much to take from it, the biggest lesson is that you don't piss off number 1. You don't worship idols, and you certainly don't try to act like top dog. As my dad used to say, "Insubordination is the one thing that guarantees you get fired." Tsk, tsk, Satan. Tsk, tsk.

More to come. . . later.

More Bunyan love

I have found John Bunyan to be the Emo of the 17C. He constantly oscillates between finding God and bemoaning his sinful past. It's awesome, frankly:
Now was I in great distress, thinking in very deed, that this might well be so; wherefore I went up and down bemoaning my sad condition; counting my self far worse than a thousand fools for standing off thus long, and spending so many years in sin as I have done; still crying out, Oh, that I had turned sooner! Oh, that I had turned seven years ago! It made me also angry with my self, to think that I should have no more wit, but to trifle away my time, till my Soul and Heaven were lost.
If John Bunyan were around today, he would be heading up Dashboard Confessional and wearing mascara.

Here's to you, John Bunyan. You kept it real-er than real. You weren't afraid to bemoan. You were a true warrior of emotive punk.

I guess somebody's got to do it. . .

John Bunyan passed some of his time in the Bedford county gaol writing verse (and making shoelaces). -- Richard L. Greaves for Oxford's Dictionary of National Biography.

As far as blogs go

Why have this blog? Well, I suppose it's less noticeable than my last blog. I don't have hoards of people reading it from time to time and wondering who is writing it.

I'm a student in a particular university. However, like many writers, I would prefer to keep things general here.

I do study Eighteenth Century British literature. I could be classified as "Asian." And most of what I will post is funny. Some of it sad. Some of it very, very angry.

I'm studying for my exams this summer. So, you'll see many posts by me as I procrastinate. I will also let you know of some funny things I find in what I read. They are truly treasures worth sharing. At least to anyone who reads this thing.