C'est la vie

First, I think this may be LM Montgomery’s angriest novel. It’s very funny, but it’s also very angry. In the Anne and Emily books small-town small-mindedness is satirized, but often with an affectionate or gently amused note. Not here! The satire is biting. Valancy’s family are small-minded, dried-up, without love or sincerity or purpose.

Secondly, the book is specifically angrily Christian. It sets itself furiously against an empty religion that consists of going to church, saying the right things, and never causing any scandal. Valancy’s path to liberation is bracketed with Biblical references. When she goes to keep house for Roaring Abel and Cecily, she feels, “Old things had passed away; everything had become new,” a reference to Revelation (“the old order of things has passed away”; “I am making everything new”). At the moment when there is a chance of Valancy turning back, when the minister comes to browbeat her into it, she is saved by a “still small voice” of her conscience, a reference to God speaking to the prophet Elijah in the book of 1st Kings. Valancy’s first major change is going to care for a sick, socially outcast, and dying girl whom everyone is avoiding because she’s not ‘respectable’ (she got pregnant outside marriage and her father is regularly drunk) – and Valancy does so out of love and compassion, not a barren sense of duty, and she finds joy in it. The echoes of the Gospel fighting against the Pharisees are very strong. She is rejecting the lifeless religion of respectability and compliance and choosing a Christianity that is characterized by joy, love, and liberation.

Third, I had completely forgotten about the rosebush and it made me laugh! It finally getting roses after Valancy hacked it to pieces is probably accurate horticulturally (some things do need to be pruned!) and also a fantastic metaphor for Valancy’s life. It is only when she hacks off the carefully-tended green leaves of obedience and being ‘well-behaved’ that she gets the roses of life and love that had been eluding her.

Fourth, the similarities between Valancy and Jane Eyre stand out to me in that the difference between each of them being “small and insignificant” or “elfish and bewitching” largely lies in whether they are fulfilled or are being trodden on, whether they are free or being kept down, and whether they are seen through eyes of love. Although Valancy does specifically make Barney Snaith promise that he has no other living wives! 🤣

Fifth, the futility of Valancy’s attempts to avoid censure and trouble from her family by “behaving”, which just lead to the same handful of minor things (eating a jar of jam as a child, losing a spoon) being continually cast up to her, while as soon as she starts rebelling they’ve got too many things to handle!

Sixth, the intense limitations on her life, the way the least things are treated as dangerous (going out without a flannel petticoat in May!) leaves Valancy not safe, but rather with very limited ability to assess actual danger. Going alone to the Chidley Corners dance was actually a very bad situation for her to be in, and both Barney Snaith and Cecily knew it! But all the things she “wasn’t supposed to do” (which was practically everything) were all of a piece to Valancy, so she had no basis for understanding that!

And seventh, the twist about Barney Snaith’s identity is in retrospect telegraphed pretty heavily, especially when the passage below is later followed up with his forest-creature friends at the Blue Castle.

“I’ve been watching a woodpecker all day,” he said one evening on the shaky old back verandah. His account of the woodpecker’s doings was satisfying. He had often some gay or cunning little anecdote of the wood folk to tell them…Barney, when he liked, could sit down on the edge of the barrens and lure those rabbits right to him by some mysterious sorcery he possessed. Valancy had once seen a squirrel leap from a scrub pine to his shoulder and sit there chattering to him. It reminded her of John Foster.”

This line made me hope that LM Montgomery got to read Jack London:

“Those silences at the back of the north wind got me. I’ve never belonged to myself since.”

The Northland Wild!

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.

Finally, the book doesn’t revolve around Valancy and Barney on the island as much as I though. They get to the island on page 151 of a 250-page book! It seems roughly split into five parts: 1) An introductory section showing in grim detail the sheer depressingness of Valancy’s life; 2) Valancy’s initial rebellions; 3) Valancy at Roaring Abel’s; 4) Valancy’s marriage to Barney Snaith and her Blue Castle; and 5) Valancy after she realizes she is not going to die.

This is *extremely* conveniently timed because I've been looking for an excuse to explain some stuff and am in a grumpy mood that I want to aim at a deserving target (which is not you! people who ask questions about this kind of stuff are doing kind of the opposite of the stuff I'm about to complain about! sincerely, thank you for asking!)

So, this is going to be a tour of how I go about searching for these kinds of things.

So, the very very first thing I did was go to duckduckgo (in my ad-blocked browser, which keeps ads and sponsored results from flooding my searches regardless of what search engine I use) and search "super gut book".

As someone with something of a history with diet (and specifically gut health) bullshit, here are the immediate red flags that pop up before I even click on anything:

"drdavisinfinitehealth.com" is the URL of a charlatan. Nobody making evidence-based medical claims would use the words "infinite health"

"Four-Week Plan" both of the screencapped previews include the words 'four-week plan' and suggest that following the four week plan would 'restore your gut health.' It takes actual human guts months to years to recover from some kinds of damage, a claimed 'restoration' in four weeks is absurd

The book contains "testimonials from experts and readers who have benefited from the method" but there's no claim in the previews that the book contains any *research* or presentation of evidence.

The book contains "resources so you can pinpoint your gut issues, correct them, and maintain your long-term health and well-being." The human digestive system is complex as fuck and includes a fuckton of organs that can be influenced by a fuckton of variables; a layperson is unlikely to be capable of pinpointing the source of *actual* gut issues without medical intervention so it's likely that this book is aimed at the worried well who probably underconsume fiber and water and will be less gassy and constipated than the average American if they ate more fruit and drank more water, but that only sells if you make up some stupid arbitrary rules so it probably says that nightshades are killing the good bacteria in your intestine or something and this is a problem to solve with internal yogurt, applied either orally or anally. (you have no idea how much i hate the gut health scammers)

At this point, I feel comfortable dismissing the book as bullshit and Dr. Davis as a quack. From two website previews alone. However I only feel comfortable doing that because I have read a ton of gut health quacks and I know how they talk; if I had no background in that I might need to dig a little deeper. Which we will do in a moment. But what I also want to point out here is that this type of search and quick analysis is one that I *also* do any time I'm researching someone who I *agree with* if I am not familiar with their work. Maybe they have opinions about TDEE that align pretty well with my understanding and seem to be reasonable about HAES but if I stumble across them as the author of a study that I'm considering citing I need to see if they are perhaps a fucking scammer, so I do a search for their names and their work just in case they have previously collaborated with someone who hawks colloidal silver.

If you find yourself agreeing with the author of some research but you're not familiar with them, you need to figure out who the fuck they are before you get too deep into the research. This saves you time and effort, and is generally best done after you've read perhaps the abstract, methodology, and conclusions sections of a paper, but before you spend too much time digging into their data.

But perhaps Dr. Davis only looks like a charlatan. Your gut microbiome DOES make a big impact on your overall gut health, maybe he's onto something here. Let's look into his credentials before we cast judgement.

I didn't even finish searching his name before getting confirmation on his yogurt agenda these motherfuckers are so fucking predictable. Anyway, onwards.

Ah. I have searched the doctor. I'm going to show you the way that my eye traveled over this image and the thoughts that accompanied it.

Hello American Cardiologist William Davis, gut health is literally not your specialty.

Modern wheat is a perfect chronic poison jesus fucking christ Wheat Belly was a curse

AUTHOR OF THE WHEAT BELLY SERIES OF BOOKS OH I ALREADY KNOW AND HATE YOU I JUST FORGOT YOUR NAME

Okay so this is already a bit unfair because William fucking Davis is the first steaming pile of medical woo shit I ran into and I suspect that every person with celiac who was diagnosed in 2012 or thereabouts has a similar level of vitriol for him because wheat belly came out in 2011 and RUINED MY FUCKING LIFE AND I HAVE A LONG HISTORY OF YELLING ABOUT IT HERE

FUCK YOU BILL DAVIS FUCK YOU WITH STICKS FUCK YOU FOR MAKING MY MEDICALLY NECESSARY DIET A FUCKING FAD DIET THAT MAKES PEOPLE THINK THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH FEEDING ME WHEAT BECAUSE IT'S JUST A FAD DIET, FUCK YOU FOR MAKING MY MEDICALLY NECESSARY DIET A FAD DIET BECAUSE DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW MANY G-FREE FOOD BRANDS HAVE GONE UNDER AND DISAPPEARED SINCE THE FAD STARTED TO FADE? THIS DOES NOT DO CUT CURB SHIT FOR PEOPLE WITH FOOD ALLERGIES AND CELIAC DISEASE IT MAKES THINGS MORE FUCKING DANGEROUS I HATE YOU SO FUCKING MUCH I CANNOT BELIEVE PEOPLE ARE STILL BUYING YOUR GRIFT OVER A DECADE LATER EAT LITERAL SHIT AND DIE YOU CANKEROUS CAVERNOUS ANAL FISTULA

"GLUTEN AWARE" COOKIES "LOW GLUTEN" BEER "GLUTEN CONSCIOUS BREAD" THESE ARE ALL YOUR FAULT MOTHERFUCKER AND THEY ARE ALL THINGS PEOPLE GAVE ME TO EAT BECAUSE THEY WERE TRYING TO BE ACCOMMODATING AND INSTEAD WERE MISLED BY YOUR FUCKING MISINFORMATION WHICH EITHER MEANT THAT I COULDN'T EAT THE THINGS MY WELL MEANING FRIENDS GOT FOR ME OR I GOT SICK FUCK YOU I HATE YOU SO FUCKING MUCH

I AM VERY BAD WITH NAMES I'M SORRY

Okay. Okay okay okay. Okay I'm cool okay, okay.

Okay so. First thing here if you are reading about an expert and you don't know about them and their shit garbage history of being a grifting conman, check if they're an expert in the thing they're being paid to be an expert in.

Dr. Fucking Davis is a real doctor but he is a cardiologist, which means that he does not have extensive education in diet. He probably has either literally the same or less formal education on diet that I do. And before anyone jumps in here with "of course cardiology overlaps with diet" think for a second how much YOU know about how well blood cholesterol levels correlate with dietary cholesterol levels and what the current consensus is on that and THAT is about how much cardiologists overlap with diet. Doctors are experts, and most doctors are specialists but Dr. Fucking Oz is plenty of proof that experts on heart health can know fuck-all about diet. Doctors are required to keep some level of continuing education in their field, but not in other fields and there's often significant lag on, say, the advice that GPs or cardiologists give about dietary fat compared to the consensus shared by people who actually specialize in nutrition.

So. Dr. Fucking Davis is not formally qualified to medically assess dietary health. Okay. But people have tons of interest and sometimes you find people who do good research outside their field. Knowing that he's not an expert on nutrition doesn't mean you should dismiss him out of hand, it just means you need to look at the information he's presenting you with a more skeptical eye. So what information is he presenting. Well, let's look at his list of published works on Wikipedia first.

That is the timeline of a grifter. And also I hate you so much doctor fucking davis.

FROM THE ToC OF HIS *FIRST* BOOK I HATE YOU SO MUCH YOU GRIFTING PIECE OF SHIT

(this is also especially frustrating because a later chapter is about lipoproteins as an indicator of heart disease and large bastard is actually currently enrolled in a study done by *ACTUAL FUCKING SCIENTISTS AND RESEARCHERS WHO GIVE A SHIT ABOUT EVIDENCE AND CARE ABOUT MORE THAN SELLING SUPPLEMENTS OR SHITTY BOOKS* that is looking at the levels of one specific lipoprotein in people who have severe heart attacks young and hey guess what motherfucker you can't fix genetics with fucking supplements i hate you so fucking much)

I want you to understand, first, that I am an insane person. Also that I have a significant family history of heart disease and a spouse who had a massive heart attack and a double organ transplant as a result.

So. Look.

I did a bunch of digging here and it turns out that this book, published in 2004, was about selling on-demand access to a scanning technology that was surpassed by CT scans in 2009 and did not appear to be at all out of step with where conventional cardiology was at that point in time (standard screenings for CAD risk, stress tests, imaging when testing indicated further examination). Dr. Scam did not find this to be a profitable grift. His second book was also on this topic and was self-published and I can't find it online.

So I tried to search his name and "research" and nothing immediately popped up but there WAS a recommendation for "Dr. William Davis Supplements" and

I hate you so much dude.

I hate you *so much* dude.

Anyway. It looks like he's got a trademarked bacteria. But before I dig into that I'm going to search "dysbiocide research davis" because that sounds like some bullshit about killing your gut biome with modern wheat.

YOU HAVE KILLED YOUR GUT FLORA WITH SUGAR AND YOU'RE FEEDING THE YEAST. THE YEAST IS DEMANDING. THE YEAST WANTS YOUR INTESTINES. KILL THE YEAST WITH MY HERBS.

We have BOTH kinds of herbs, Eastern AND Western.

Okay I've used like four variations and have not actually found a study that Dr. Fucking Davis did but I did find this:

And I have too much self respect and too little remaining time on earth to search "BioGaia Strains" or pretend to do serious digging into someone so unserious that they're talking about "BioGaia" lactobacillus strains.

Fuck this guy. He's a scammer who has been a scammer selling supplements for his whole career.

One of Davis's central claims in Wheat Belly is that wheat is addictive because it metabolizes into opiates as it is digested; this is based on a rat study from the 1970s that you may also recognize as part of the "science" that Andrew Wakefield used to claim that vaccines cause autism (because you see the measles from the vaccine hide in the guts causing autistic enterocolitis, which causes gut permeability, which allows the not-wholly-broken-down gut opiates to get into the bloodstream and the brain, brain damaging the autism into the child because of the vaccine).

I have to stop talking about this or I am going to do crimes.

Your intuition was correct the book is bullshit and I am reminded that I have a nemesis and he is still publishing books and his continued ability to do so is an ulcer on the skin of the world.

Rest in Peace, Tony.

I'll always remember your smile.