David Davis

I am continually fascinated and intrigued by literature (I follow the Northrup Frye school), writing (I count Twain, Chandler, and Bradbury as among my masters), the philosophy of religion, and of course blues & rock and roll music. Plus zymurgy.

Other things about me (from a 2010 interview with my colleague, Karen Vitali. Excerpt used courtesy of Karen Vitali) :

-- "Copyright and intellectual property is only one of Dave Davis' many passions. He plays oldies on his rock-and-roll guitar (a red Gretsch hollowbody), moderates an online discussion group about writer Charles Williams (d. 1945), cultivates an active interest in medieval history, and brews his own beer. He's also hiked all of the 4,000 foot peaks in New England."

-- "Underneath each of Davis' passions lies an innate desire to learn more, to analyze information, and figure out how things work. These are essential skills for any good librarian, and Davis is, in many ways, the quintessential librarian."

--"On Dave's eighteenth birthday, President Nixon resigned. "I thought of it as a personal favor to me."

-- "One particular area of interest for Davis is the Fourth Crusade, an early thirteenth-century debacle championed by Pope Innocent III. The Pope intended for his armies to retake Jerusalem from the Islamic rulers controlling the city. Instead, they conquered Constantinople, the largest Christian city in the world at the time. He describes the events of the crusade to me as if he was recapping the plot of a bad action film.

"The crusaders get some money together and they say, 'let's go help out the Holy Land.' They don't have enough money to do what they want to do, so they take out a loan from the Venetians. They only get as far as Venice before they run out of funds and out of supplies," explains Davis.

"The crusaders ask the Venetians for more money. The Venetians consent - on the condition that they overtake Zara, a rebellious city in modern Croatia that had recently escaped Venetian control. So they invade this Christian principality on behalf of the Venetians, take it over, hand it to the Venetians. Now that Venetians are on board with their Crusade plan, so they give the crusaders new funding and off they go heading east again. There are storms, so instead of going all the way to Egypt or Lebanon, which is where you'd go to launch an expedition to Jerusalem, they end up in Constantinople, where there's this palace intrigue going on with a nephew of one of the emperors who is a claimant to the throne. The crusaders get involved, they take one side, they end up overthrowing the Greeks and you have the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople for 50 years.

"They never got to the Holy Land at all. Instead, they took over the largest Christian country in the world! The Eastern Roman Empire. It is a series of 'Oopses.' That's why I call it the 'Oops crusade.'"

-- "What fascinates Davis most about Williams and his contemporaries, Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, is their belief in the power of fiction and poetry to "encapsulate true observations about the world." According to Davis, this concept bound the group of writers together, and explains why their work still resonates today.

"One of the things Williams said is that we shouldn't read writers like they are in a Petri dish. This was a living, breathing individual who was trying to say 'I've discovered something really, really important about the way the world is. And I'm going to tell you what I've seen.' Just because they lived a long time ago we shouldn't say, 'Oh, he's only saying that because he's a Puritan in the Restoration,' like Milton, for example. No--he's saying that because that's the single most important thing that's ever happened to him."