I do a lot of reading - as a writer, I guess I'm supposed to, but I always did anyway. See my About reading page on this site. As well as the books I get through, I also read a lot of fragments of things - on the internet, in magazines, and in books I'm not reading, as such, at the moment, but in books I have read or will read. I was bored with whatever I was reading yesterday, and picked up my battered copy of David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace; the Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. One of the advantages of such a long title is that I don't need to explain what it's about. If you want to re-examine the origins of what's going on now in the Middle East, then this is a good place to start: scheming westerners and Americans feature, of course, but also, to be balanced, a lot of opportunist local leaders willing to be schemed against for a slice of the pie. The passage I was reading featured the lead-up to the Greek-Turkish war of the early 1920s; Greek Prime Minster Venizelos had realised by the twenties that Lloyd George no longer had it in him, nor any real political clout anymore, to support his so-called 'Grand Idea' - this was for the Greeks to occupy Anatolia and regain a large part of the territory that would have made up ancient Greece - a skewed idea, in any case, ancient Greece being a series of city-states, rather than a united nation. The main problem was that Anatolia had become the heartland of the new Turkish republic under Kemal Ataturk. All the same, Venizelos kept on discussing it with Lloyd George who, with no real interest in it, kept the Greeks at bay with a year of dissembling. Should Venizelos send his army into Anantolia to attack the Turks? The book continues:
What Venizelos and Lloyd George would have decided to do can never be known for sure, for one of the most bizarre political accidents in modern history took the matter out of their hands. On 30 September 1920 the young Greek King, Alexander, while taking a walk in the grounds of his palace, was bitten by a monkey. A severe fever set in and, on 25 October, Alexander died. In a famous phrase, Winston Churchill later wrote that "It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite" - for it was his belief that if Alexander and Venizelos had continued to rule Greece, the tragic outcome of the war that Greece was to wage against Turkey in 1921 and 1922 would have been averted.
I don't know what grabs me so much about this story. I used it as the basis for an incident in my story Monstrous Men - see my Short stories and tall tales page - which goes:
Even as an unacknowledged child of privilege, L’s child had been allowed to go anywhere she wanted to. This included the animal cages at the palace zoo where, one day, a gibbon bit her. The wound festered, and she died, closely followed, probably, by the monkey keeper and the nanny.
I like stories about animals, in general, though inevitably I read more of them as a child than I do as an adult. There's something about their lack of intent, the laissez-faire chaos of their world, that appeals to me, I think. I'm writing a story at the moment that features an animal at its centre - not a thinking one, like Tom, or Jerry, Top Cat, Roadrunner, but an animal nevertheless. The story partly features how people relate to animals, and how people get them to appear to reflect their own opinions, and, it is suggested, endorse them. That's not the main point of the story (which is quite long) but one that came out of the background as I wrote. At the moment the story is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum, and I think it'll be under construction for a while yet. You can see two pieces from this tale - at the moment, not quite long enough to be a novella, but terribly long for a short story - here: http://www.nicksweeneywriting.com/my-works-in-progress.html
What Venizelos and Lloyd George would have decided to do can never be known for sure, for one of the most bizarre political accidents in modern history took the matter out of their hands. On 30 September 1920 the young Greek King, Alexander, while taking a walk in the grounds of his palace, was bitten by a monkey. A severe fever set in and, on 25 October, Alexander died. In a famous phrase, Winston Churchill later wrote that "It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey's bite" - for it was his belief that if Alexander and Venizelos had continued to rule Greece, the tragic outcome of the war that Greece was to wage against Turkey in 1921 and 1922 would have been averted.
I don't know what grabs me so much about this story. I used it as the basis for an incident in my story Monstrous Men - see my Short stories and tall tales page - which goes:
Even as an unacknowledged child of privilege, L’s child had been allowed to go anywhere she wanted to. This included the animal cages at the palace zoo where, one day, a gibbon bit her. The wound festered, and she died, closely followed, probably, by the monkey keeper and the nanny.
I like stories about animals, in general, though inevitably I read more of them as a child than I do as an adult. There's something about their lack of intent, the laissez-faire chaos of their world, that appeals to me, I think. I'm writing a story at the moment that features an animal at its centre - not a thinking one, like Tom, or Jerry, Top Cat, Roadrunner, but an animal nevertheless. The story partly features how people relate to animals, and how people get them to appear to reflect their own opinions, and, it is suggested, endorse them. That's not the main point of the story (which is quite long) but one that came out of the background as I wrote. At the moment the story is called The Fortune Teller's Factotum, and I think it'll be under construction for a while yet. You can see two pieces from this tale - at the moment, not quite long enough to be a novella, but terribly long for a short story - here: http://www.nicksweeneywriting.com/my-works-in-progress.html
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