October 2019

Wolf Hall Bandwagon

October 7, 2019

Book choice for May 2019, by Hilary Mantel

Wolf Hall is a great and engrossing work of historical fiction. I ate it up in at few days and it was such a relief to sink into a wonderful page-turner (which also felt a weensy bit highbrow). It was lovely how it happened too: after a very patchy summer reading wise, riddled with unfinished boring books or no time to read at all, and after a productive but emotionally chaotic conference visit (when I got back I realized I hadn’t taken ONE picture of Paris, which pretty much sums up my academic life), and then our subsequent (and I mean the DAY AFTER I got back) move—-and AFTER the end of our hellish sprint as an Institute to submit the first volume of our Dictionary to the press—–after a few wild nights of staying at work til 4am—-I wandered dazedly to the only bookstore with some English books in town (the English shelf is now 2 shelves, to German’s detriment)—and I found a petite paperback copy of Wolf Hall. Thank god, I sighed.

And I was right! As so many before me had hinted. It was wonderful to be in our new apartment, surrounded by boxes and chaos, ignoring it all with something I wanted to read. Immediately after I finished it I bought the sequel on the kindle app so I could read it on my phone—I had no hope of finding a hardcopy of the sequel in a German bookstore. (And somehow this lack it choice makes my life and concentration better, in general).

I didn’t enjoy the second book as much as the first, but it absolutely wasn’t an effort to read. It concentrates on Thomas Cromwell (I really need to find out if his family tree sprouted the later Oliver Cromwell!) rather than the frankly more interesting personage of Anne Boleyn, which is of course a less-explored angle, but as the second book of the Wolf Hall trilogy is concerned with her downfall, the choice to restrict Anne to a few scenes…well, it wasn’t the story I knew well.

One thing that does stick in my memory is Cromwell’s impression of Anne in a pink and grey silk dress to the effect of “it should have been pretty and youthful but all I could think of was spilled intestines” which is bitingly lovely.

Hillary Mantel did seem to be a bit in love with Cromwell in the second book, which wasn’t a plus, in the way that she went to great lengths and used euphemistic and unrealistic means to exonerate him from having used torture to produce confessions from prisoners, which I am quite certain he did. These things were routine, but Mantel apparently didn’t want them in her hero.

There is also, in the second book a twice or thrice-repeated “impression” from the first book, which certainly was spooky and evocative the first time it was mentioned, but dulled swiftly with repetition.

All in all, I enjoyed both these novels (the second is called Bring up the Bodies or whatnot) the first intensively (I have since heard Jennifer from the Insert Literary Pun Here youtube channel say that Wolf Hall was the book that made her want to be a book reviewer, in order to be able to explain how it worked so well—which shows how late I am to this bandwagon, as she read it years ago and now IS a professional reviewer) and I will definitely read the third, to finish off Mr. Cromwell (probably literally).

A breath of fresh air, in a reading year into which I have perhaps already crammed too many classics. To forget oneself—is divine.

The Unbearable Heaviness of Being

October 1, 2019

Ever since I wrote my last post, I’ve been mulling something over on the back-burner of my mind. I just can’t…bear to…be so negative. This blog is not turning out how I wanted it to. In my last post, which I thought was my cleverest, and best, I just railed about a system that is not changing. It’s going to be capitalism from here on out, until the world ends because we ended it. And somehow, that gives me comfort at this point. So much of this life is out of my control, I just have to witness how things go down. I think the attempts at making government work for the larger majority of people were righteous and heroic. The ones that were stamped out, as it was in Chile, I think need to be remembered and the victims of the coup need to be remembered. They tried for a better world, and external conditions (the powerful capitalist structures that are) forbade it, and internally, the dissatisfaction of individuals for whatever reason, also broke it.

In the last few weeks, or maybe the last year, since I converted to Marxism and understood what had happened to me, I have been so dissatisfied. As one is when they look at a world and dream of one better, that exists, and has a high likelihood of only existing, in one’s own mind (and the minds of a select few others). Probably early Christian missionaries who saw the unlikelihood of vast continents converting felt this way (but in the end, the continents did! With some horrific loss of culture…) And there have been many for social change on the large scale…just making this happen in the face of the EXACT opposite wave of thinking is such an exhausting thought. This week we were in a bookstore here which had a table of books about the DDR, maybe 50 titles, and I read them all and realized that NONE of them were ACTUALLY about the DDR, unless it was about “escaping” it, and then I read the sign above the table “Germany Celebrates Reunification.” I’m not sure how history will remember the DDR, but right now, it is clear there is only one way to think about it. Thank God that’s over.

It may be that we are living in the most exciting times in history. Just today I thought that it was the best time to be alive, that thought jogs through my mind sometimes. I want to be more grateful. I don’t want to be depressed, about a hypothetical better world, when I am enjoying the most independence and a wonderful relationship and excellent working conditions and the most beautiful apartment of my life! Life is good!!!!!

Life is good for me, today.

And I want to go up and up. And I *think* life is 90% how you think about it. And right now, here, is good. I’m not going to think of hypotheticals, I’m going to stop being so sour. There is almost nothing I can affect, but my immediate surroundings. Sorry. It seems that is a bad way to think but how often do large-impact decisions (no, not arguing at a dinner party) come into it. Yes, I’ll vote once or twice a year —-I’m not going to surrender my one kick at the can. But…I am going to chill it on the Socialism talk on this blog (I think). It just makes me upset, that we are half choosing this capitalism everyday, half having it and its propaganda forced upon us. But wishing for more equality and doing nothing to achieve it, daily, is also such an uncomfortable way to live. So I’m being open about my capitulation.

Frankly, I am tired of complaining. This blog is my escapist happy place, where I just try new things and develop myself (that last part sounds incredible capitalist cult-of-the-individual-esque). But it is what it is. I am going to accentuate the positive. I am going to find wonder again.