Meanwhile I found most of the Cherry Ames series on Libby (misnumbered so I didn't realize there were like five to seven missing until I started googling) and for some inexplicable reason related to Nancy Drew nostalgia decided to read all of them. They're 1940s children's books. (Though actually I guess more progressive than you might expect; one of Cherry's classmates is Chinese and she's treated about the same as all the other girls, and none of Cherry's boyfriends have lasted more than two books because some dumb boy doesn't compare to an awesome nursing career.)
And then of course I went to AO3 as I always do to see what eldritch horrors man was not meant to know exist in the way of fanfiction. There were only two measly Cherry Ames femslash fics, and one barely deserved the name because it was flash fic and the femslashy bit was one brief sentence.
son i am disappoint
Like come on you guys, she has no interested in getting married and she notices when other women are attractive. (Granted, in the 1940s neither of those said anything about a book character's sexuality, especially because if your series character marries, he or she can not longer go on exciting adventures, which is why Dr. Watson and Arsene Lupin keep on tragically losing their love interests. Though in Watson's case that might also be because Conan Doyle had some issues with continuity. Also the Cherry Ames series was aimed at like middle schoolers who were barely past the boys have cooties phase. But no one puts these caveats in when they're claiming Sherlock Holmes is secretly gay. I do find it obnoxious that the people who go around being all "asexuality is valid" somehow don't consider asexuality a valid option when it comes to men who weren't all that interested in sex. I'm sorry, people up until the mid-20th century when Freud and Havelock Ellis et al fully breached quarantine saw asexuality as more valid than you guys.)
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Meanwhile I found most of the Cherry Ames series on Libby (misnumbered so I didn't realize there were like five to seven missing until I started googling) and for some inexplicable reason related to Nancy Drew nostalgia decided to read all of them. They're 1940s children's books. (Though actually I guess more progressive than you might expect; one of Cherry's classmates is Chinese and she's treated about the same as all the other girls, and none of Cherry's boyfriends have lasted more than two books because some dumb boy doesn't compare to an awesome nursing career.)
And then of course I went to AO3 as I always do to see what eldritch horrors man was not meant to know exist in the way of fanfiction. There were only two measly Cherry Ames femslash fics, and one barely deserved the name because it was flash fic and the femslashy bit was one brief sentence.
son i am disappoint
Like come on you guys, she has no interested in getting married and she notices when other women are attractive. (Granted, in the 1940s neither of those said anything about a book character's sexuality, especially because if your series character marries, he or she can not longer go on exciting adventures, which is why Dr. Watson and Arsene Lupin keep on tragically losing their love interests. Though in Watson's case that might also be because Conan Doyle had some issues with continuity. Also the Cherry Ames series was aimed at like middle schoolers who were barely past the boys have cooties phase. But no one puts these caveats in when they're claiming Sherlock Holmes is secretly gay. I do find it obnoxious that the people who go around being all "asexuality is valid" somehow don't consider asexuality a valid option when it comes to men who weren't all that interested in sex. I'm sorry, people up until the mid-20th century when Freud and Havelock Ellis et al fully breached quarantine saw asexuality as more valid than you guys.)
Why are all these modern writers so bad? I keep seeing fiction that looks interesting and then looking them up, and they're not unreadable, but they're just not good, stylistically. And it's not because they're not Literature, because there were a lot of people who wrote genre fiction that was very well-written. Like I don't think people think of Agatha Christie as a good writer, but that's because it feels so easy that you don't notice the writing (and her brilliant plot twists are still brilliant decades later even when you already know what's going to happen). And Raymond Chandler is a good writer that you do notice. Talbot Mundy's The Nine Unknown is like watching a brilliant juggling act. And even A. E. W. Mason, who isn't really read anymore and it's kind of not unfair, has a similar sort of facility of writing as Agatha Christie, and you can read Musk and Amber without noticing how absurd the plot is until you try to explain it to someone.
(Also Literature can be equally dismally written. I read Amazon's sample of Call Me By Your Name and had no interest in reading the rest of it because it was written by someone who was trying to be lyrical but wasn't actually lyrical. You could see what he wanted to do, but he didn't do it.)
But I've been reading these modern books and they're just so badly written (I mean, not that it's stopping me from taking them out of the library, though it is making me hesitate about buying the one that isn't in the library). I'm reading the sample of The Thirteenth Tale right now (because someone else has the ebook currently) and the letter from Vida Winter sounds like what someone who isn't a brilliant and perceptive but very eccentric writer thinks someone who is a brilliant and perceptive but very eccentric writer writes like. Also, setting aside the stylistic issues, I don't know what kind of students buy their textbooks at an antiquarian book store, especially one that explicitly doesn't sell contemporary books. Like even if you're studying something like classics and your professor takes pity on you and assigns an older copy so you can get a used version instead of the insane prices they charge for the most up-to-date ones (actually I don't know if that's a humanities problem - there was an issue with math and science textbooks where the publishers would keep putting out new editions with minimal and meaningless changes so you'd in theory have to buy the newest edition, though I think most professors caught onto this pretty quickly and thwarted them - my coding theory textbook was photocopies, which I think was a joint effort between my professor and the professor that wrote it because they didn't want us to have to pay the ridiculous amount of money it would have cost if it had been reprinted), you're still not buying it from an antiquarian book store, especially if you plan to return it at the end of the year. And especially because I don't think your professors want you using the Victorian edition of Catullus. (Now if you were a classics student who fell in love with a Victorian edition of Catullus and bought it on your own, that would be different, but that's not what she's describing.)
I also don't think she understands how book collectors work, when she's talking about books that aren't "important enough to be sought after by collectors". Bro. There is at least one person who collects the books of 18th and 19th century sermons that writers in the Edwardian era made fun of. There is at least one person who is trying to acquire every issue of True Confessions magazine. Not every collector collects rare, famous, and expensive things. It's like she did the research but missed the mentality. Or just ignored it, because the main character has the standard collector mindset. It's not about expensive, it's about wanting to know.
Also I don't like how Dad's the cool sympathetic parent and Mom's the boring parent who can't understand, because they always do that and when you do it all the time it's sexist. There was a quote I saw from a feminist writer about this exact thing and I don't remember who it was. (Also, like, why is the dead twin the secret that her mother is hiding but not her father? Like they both knew about it. Also it's just as much her parents' secret as hers. Also if all she has is the birth certificate, how did she know that she was a conjoined twin?)
Also I think her idea of old books is a bit simplistic. They did have tragic endings back in the old days. Thomas Hardy, anyone? Edith Wharton? And Lovecraft is neither contemporary nor optimistic. There is no God, only the Great Old Ones who are incomprehensible and indifferent to humanity. They're not even driving you insane because they hate you, they just don't care. And there were a ton of Yiddish writers from the turn of the 20th century who definitely weren't writing stories that wound things up nicely and neatly. In fact, a lot of the Yiddish stories you can find in English are relatively bleak because the Literature is what gets translated, not the trash fiction where the detective solves the mystery and rescues the kidnapped girl and the good end happily and the bad unhappily and the primary audience is definitely not modern English-speaking intellectuals. (Irritating, because that's the kind of old fiction I prefer. I think you get a better sense of how people thought with trash than with Literature, and it's often more fun. Though to be fair people like I. B. Singer and Sholem Aleichem were also not writing just for intellectuals, though Singer definitely has New Yorker short story vibes in a bad way. I have actually not read much Sholem Aleichem because he didn't write ghost stories.)
Wait, wait, the main character says one of her favorite books is Wuthering Heights but she wants books that wind up everything nicely and neatly? I mean, I guess technically it ends with the youngest generation married and supposedly everyone's ghosts at rest, but it's a pretty bleak book. It's not like Dickens, who does tend to do cozy endings no matter what terrible things happen to the protagonists in the meantime. (Though he's also not just shallow sentiment, since a lot of his books were social commentary. It's like people acting like Show Boat is a pretty little musical when in fact it was incredibly innovative because the songs were all part of the story, it had an integrated cast, and there was a fairly positive subplot about interracial marriage. In 1927. Or the watch guys who go on about "CaRtIeR's jUsT a jEwElRy cOmPaNy". Actually it produced the first men's wristwatch (as opposed to wristwatches that started their lives a pocketwatches), and the Tank, which came a little later, was either the first or one of the first square wristwatches. (Women were wearing wristwatches before men, but the watch community is heavily male so they don't care about women's wristwatches. Also they dismiss one of the most venerable watch companies because they think it can't make good watches if it makes jewelry for women.))
Also speaking of Dickens, if Vida Winter is writing Angela Carter-esque fairy tales except with more tragedy (since I sort of remember a lot of the Angela Carter stories working out in the end), why are people calling her a modern Dickens? He was incredibly sentimental. (Someone has called Terry Pratchet a modern Dickens and I think that one works.)
Also she's never bought new paperbacks from a regular bookshop? Because my copies of Middlemarch, Dame of the Camellias, Merchant of Venice, and House of Mirth were all brand new paperbacks from Books-A-Million in the mall (and some guy asked if I was an English major because I was holding House of Mirth and looking at George Eliot or possibly vice versa). Sometimes it's easier to get the cheap modern reprints if all you want is a reading copy. Incidentally Dame of the Camellias had this forward about how the translator wanted to make it accessible to the modern youth because it was such a modern story because it was all about young people being in love etc and then on the first page of the actual story she used the word "cloaca" as in "sewer". Fail.
Oh goody, mom's shallow and crazy. And repressed, but not in a sympathetic way. As usual. And I'm not hopeful that will change, because I don't feel like the author is good at twisting cliches like that. Though maybe I'm wrong. It's not just that she's bad stylistically. There was one girl I was friends with back on Livejournal who was absolutely dismal technically, but her ideas and characterizations were really good and unusual, and she could use stuff from her life in her stories in a way that didn't feel like she was using her readers for free therapy. (There was one character who could read minds and she was writing his memory of his mother taking him to doctors, witch doctors, psychiatrists, psychics, and so on to try to stop his mindreading, and this girl had more severe Asperger's than me, and knowing that, it felt very much like she was drawing from her own experience, but in a way that made what she was writing seem real, not in a way that made it seem like she had unresolved issues that were bleeding through. This is not easy.) Unfortunately I think she never got past the technical issues, which were really bad.
But anyway this author doesn't seem like she's bad in that way, she seems like she's bad because she can't recognize when her stuff is trite or false.
It's a similar problem as with Lucky Red, except this book is miles better because Lucky Red was absolutely dismal, but in both cases it feels like the author has these beats she wants to hit and isn't noticing when they don't flow. Like you can plan things out beforehand, but when you start writing you have be able to see when the stuff you planned doesn't fit in anymore. Also both of them tend toward overwrought.
"Just as blotting paper absorbs ink, so all this wool and fabric absorbed sound, with one difference: Where blotting paper takes up only excess ink, the fabric of the house seemed to suck in the very essence of the words we spoke."
Don't explain the metaphor, you clown. Actually a lot of this is like, "I can't tell you what to cut, but I know there's too much here." Like I don't dislike purple prose - I love Vernon Lee and Arthur Machen, and I don't like Oscar Wilde on a personal level but he's still a very good writer (and his comedy manages to be still funny, as opposed to the puns in "My Grandfather's Clock"), but good purple prose doesn't contain any more words than it needs either.
Every time she tries to describe Vida Winter's work it doesn't sound original or interesting. Ah yes, an elderly nun shows up on the doorstep of a young man who doesn't take her seriously at first, but she has come to reveal a secret that will change his life. My interest is not piqued. All the protagonists in the fairy tales get what they want, but then they realize they must pay a terrible price for it? My dear, "The Monkey's Paw" was published in 1902. Also, dark retellings of fairy tales might have actually been original in the 40s or 50s (though I'm not 100% sure about this), but they're a drug on the market now, so you need a little more for the reader than "oh my God, all of the happy endings are actually unhappy". Also, just because Margaret doesn't like contemporary books, surely she's not completely unfamiliar with them when they're just lying around constantly. I'm not a fan of science fiction, but I've read a lot of it because my mother is and it was just there.
To be fair, it's not so wretched I'm taking it off hold, because mysteries have to be pretty dismal before I won't read them, but lord it's not good. Though my hundred-years-in-the-future equivalent may find early 21st century cliches refreshing and great fun.
I am so incredibly tired of the way so-called progressives decide they're entitled to know intensely personal information about you as soon as you say something they don't like. Like no, you aren't entitled to know whatever mental or physical health issues I have, whether I have a developmental disorder, what my family life was like, what my ethnic background is, what my sexuality or gender identity is, etc in order for you to pretend you're listening to me (because even if I do tell you I am speaking about a community I'm part of, you're still going to find some way to dismiss what I'm saying).
It's not even like this information is something I'm ashamed of or want to hide. Pretty much all of it is stuff that everyone around me knows. It's just that it's my personal information and I should get to choose who I tell it to.
It's also like, in a lot of cases these people will be super worried about prejudice against whatever group of people they want to know if you're a member of, but somehow if you say something they disagree with they don't have a problem with forcing you to out yourself. Like if you're so worried about homophobia, why are you making me tell you in writing, in a public forum, whether I'm not straight? And it's bad enough when it's someone actually from the group, but a lot of the time it's allies. Like no, neurotypical person, you don't get to tell me that I shouldn't talk about this unless I am neurodivergent, and therefore put me in a position where I either have let you talk over me about something that affects me and not you or tell everyone reading the conversation about my neuro-psychological diagnoses regardless of whether it's their business or not and regardless of whether I feel comfortable telling people, including you.
Like this went from not talking over the people you're talking about to another way to harass and bully people the way a Formula One car goes from 0 to 200 right off the starting line.
(This is also why I always hate whenever people start going on about how they should only cast queer actors in queer parts. People's personal lives are their own business and they shouldn't be forced to disclose perfectly benign information about it to get a job. Not every queer person wants to tell the entire world about it, even the ones that aren't closeted.)
Jesus Christ, you clown. He was captured by his enemies and in imminent danger of execution; his awesome plan had fallen apart and it was partly his fault; he was worried that his boss to whom he owed so much of his success and who was kind of crazy would blame himself (and probably the rest of his friends and family); and he probably hadn't caught up on the sleep he lost right before and after his capture. Losing it is perfectly justifiable behavior. (Also, he wasn't "adeptly sensitive" at detecting his audience's values, he shared them. He behaved the way they thought an honorable gentleman should behave because it was also the way he thought he should behave as an honorable gentleman. It's not weird to want to go to your death with dignity.)
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I meant to link these ages ago. They're both on JSTOR but I'm pretty sure half the people here are in college so they have access automatically and you can read 100 articles a month with a free account anyway, so it's only a mild pain to read them.
I meant to link these ages ago. They're both on JSTOR but I'm pretty sure half the people here are in college so they have access automatically and you can read 100 articles a month with a free account anyway, so it's only a mild pain to read them.
OK, I may be new to the 18th century, but I've spent the past 20 years reading trash from (and non-fiction about) the turn of the 20th century and I was obsessed with The Picture of Dorian Gray and associated works in eighth and ninth grade. (I even own a copy of one of Lord Alfred Douglas's books of poetry as well as what is I think the one biography of him that exists.). I just saw some intellectually dishonest idiot go "Let the story of Oscar Wilde inspire you to learn more about abolition".
Ah yes, an upper class forty-something man who was cheating on his wife with poor teenage boys that he had to pay to sleep with him (and it wasn't even just 18-year-old teenage boys which would be creepy but not outright illegal today - Douglas was definitely sleeping with 14-year-olds and he and Wilde didn't actually have sex with each other, they just shared teenage prostitutes) is exactly the sort of person that would convince everyone that prison was bad. (Also I swear I was wandering around wikipedia and found an article about some guy that mentioned that he and Oscar Wilde visited North Africa and slept with boys there - Andre "I'm not a homosexual, I'm a pederast" Gide maybe? - which I would believe, because evidently Douglas missed the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest because he was "stuck in Biskra, North Africa where he was attempting to run away with an Arab boy". (Also I've seen some stuff that made me think that having sex with underage North African boys was one of the touristy things you did along with visiting the Pyramids and camel rides if you were a specific type of gross European man in the 19th and early-mid 20th century.))
Wilde also deserved two years in prison for gross stupidity. He wasn't arrested while he was minding his own business at a gay bar with his adult boyfriend. He was arrested and sent to prison because Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who had been trying to pick a fight with Wilde for ages, sent Wilde a card that said "To Oscar Wilde - posing as a somdomite(sic)", and Wilde, instead of saying "wtf does that looney toon even mean" and dropping it into the fire or challenging him to pistols at dawn or hiring someone to wait outside his house and break his legs and then sending in a card that said "To the Marquess of Queensberry - posing as a man with no kneecaps", he decided to sue him for libel even though everyone seems to have interpreted "posing as a somdomite" as being a sodomite and truth is an effective defense against libel. So Queensberry showed up at his libel trial with a string of teenage rent-boys, Wilde realized he had made a terrible mistake and withdrew the lawsuit, Queensberry - because he was the most vindictive man in the British Empire - turned around and marched his herd of teenagers over to Scotland Yard and insisted they prosecute Wilde, and Wilde, his temporary fit of sanity being over, decided to stay in England instead of taking a vacation in France until the whole thing blew over like every one of his friends with any amount of common sense and Lord Alfred Douglas were telling him to do. I have very little sympathy for him at this point. Like, sorry you got punished for taking sexual advantage of lower-class teenagers which you could have avoided if you weren't stupid or creepy.
Also when I was looking for the Arab boy quote (which I thought said explicitly he was 14, but actually that was another kid Douglas was chasing), I found this:
[This is in 1898, so Douglas was 28] Douglas claimed later that there had been a cooling in Wilde's attitude towards him. In retrospect Douglas blamed his appearance for this: he still looked like a schoolboy, but he was tired. Throughout his life, Wilde had sought beauty, and in his mind, youth was inextricably linked with it. When Douglas began to lose his youth in Wilde's eyes, he began to lose his beauty. In this respect , it is clear that the devotion Douglas felt for Wilde was purer, since Wilde was never physically attractive to him, while physical attraction was clearly important to Wilde.
So the two things that I found interesting in this were how coyly this is phrased - basically Wilde lost interest in him because Douglas started looking like an adult and he wasn't interested in adult men, and then the last sentence about Douglas's devotion being purer because there had never been any sexual attraction on his part. I was surprised because I was thinking of Douglas Murray as one of the previous generation of gay men who think lots and lots of sex is an inherent part of gay male culture, but I guess if he was born in 1979 he might have come of age after the AIDS crisis but close enough that it still affected people, or he spent so much mental time in the early 20th century that he started thinking like them. (I have this feeling that there were a lot of long-term male partnerships from that period that everyone assumes were sexual but actually weren't, just because periodically it keeps turning out that actually these two guys who lived together for years were completely celibate. Also Duncan Grant had himself buried next to Vanessa Bell. And then there's Gore Vidal who evidently said that sex ruined long-term relationships.) And then of course Douglas Murray doesn't have the average gay man's political beliefs either.
OK, I may be new to the 18th century, but I've spent the past 20 years reading trash from (and non-fiction about) the turn of the 20th century and I was obsessed with The Picture of Dorian Gray and associated works in eighth and ninth grade. (I even own a copy of one of Lord Alfred Douglas's books of poetry as well as what is I think the one biography of him that exists.). I just saw some intellectually dishonest idiot go "Let the story of Oscar Wilde inspire you to learn more about abolition".
Ah yes, an upper class forty-something man who was cheating on his wife with poor teenage boys that he had to pay to sleep with him (and it wasn't even just 18-year-old teenage boys which would be creepy but not outright illegal today - Douglas was definitely sleeping with 14-year-olds and he and Wilde didn't actually have sex with each other, they just shared teenage prostitutes) is exactly the sort of person that would convince everyone that prison was bad. (Also I swear I was wandering around wikipedia and found an article about some guy that mentioned that he and Oscar Wilde visited North Africa and slept with boys there - Andre "I'm not a homosexual, I'm a pederast" Gide maybe? - which I would believe, because evidently Douglas missed the premiere of The Importance of Being Earnest because he was "stuck in Biskra, North Africa where he was attempting to run away with an Arab boy". (Also I've seen some stuff that made me think that having sex with underage North African boys was one of the touristy things you did along with visiting the Pyramids and camel rides if you were a specific type of gross European man in the 19th and early-mid 20th century.))
Wilde also deserved two years in prison for gross stupidity. He wasn't arrested while he was minding his own business at a gay bar with his adult boyfriend. He was arrested and sent to prison because Lord Alfred Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who had been trying to pick a fight with Wilde for ages, sent Wilde a card that said "To Oscar Wilde - posing as a somdomite(sic)", and Wilde, instead of saying "wtf does that looney toon even mean" and dropping it into the fire or challenging him to pistols at dawn or hiring someone to wait outside his house and break his legs and then sending in a card that said "To the Marquess of Queensberry - posing as a man with no kneecaps", he decided to sue him for libel even though everyone seems to have interpreted "posing as a somdomite" as being a sodomite and truth is an effective defense against libel. So Queensberry showed up at his libel trial with a string of teenage rent-boys, Wilde realized he had made a terrible mistake and withdrew the lawsuit, Queensberry - because he was the most vindictive man in the British Empire - turned around and marched his herd of teenagers over to Scotland Yard and insisted they prosecute Wilde, and Wilde, his temporary fit of sanity being over, decided to stay in England instead of taking a vacation in France until the whole thing blew over like every one of his friends with any amount of common sense and Lord Alfred Douglas were telling him to do. I have very little sympathy for him at this point. Like, sorry you got punished for taking sexual advantage of lower-class teenagers which you could have avoided if you weren't stupid or creepy.
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Unfriendly reminder that if your DNI covers like 95% of a group of people, you're not their ally. (Also you can't possibly know how to support someone if you refuse to listen to them unless they say things you like.)
Second unfriendly reminder that allyship has been mainly about performatively stroking the worst kind of egos for at least the past five to ten years. (Look, I am old enough to remember when no one thought gay marriage was going to be legalized in our lifetimes - so when being an ally wasn't as easy or popular - and also I was a teenager at the time, - so exactly when you'd want to make a big deal of how enlightened you are - and I went to a magnet school for theater in the Northeast where it was safe to be gay or support gay people - so it wasn't like the people I knew were hiding it to protect themselves from homophobia - and no one I knew then made anywhere near as big a deal of being a queer ally as the "queer allies" I've seen the past few years, when the country has more accepting of queer people than it has ever. And the straight people* I knew who supported gay rights in the 70s - so when it was an even bigger deal- also didn't go around acting like they were some big damn heroes, even now, when it would make them look good.
Also modern allyship is basically useless unless you're a narcissist. I can tell you stories.)
*ok technically one of the people I'm thinking of had multiple same-sex relationships in college, including one that was pretty serious, but she mostly or entirely dated men after that so she doesn't consider herself gay. (Even though all the upper class turn of the 20th century British men who did exactly the same thing get their gay-until-graduation taken seriously. I mean, if she wants to consider herself straight, that's fine because it's her choice, but I'm sure it's partly because the rest of society doesn't take your relationships with women seriously if they think you were ever interested in a man. It made me so angry when I found out how many queer Edwardian men had actually just been gay-until-graduation at all male schools given how women who do the same thing get treated.)
I like The Mirror and the Light better than Bring Up the Bodies, though it definitely follows the rule where if you write a really successful book, your editors stop editing the sequels. I'm not sure it really needed to be nearly 1000 pages long.
The more Jane Seymour the better though. I'm not sure if Hilary Mantel intended Jane Seymour to be autistic or if she just had an idea and that's what came out (probably the latter because good writers write people and bad writers force their characters into the shapes they've already decided), but she's one of the best characters in the book. (Possibly this is why I didn't like Bring Up the Bodies, because I felt like she didn't come off so much as weird, just slow.) And also not like any other Jane Seymour I've run into. She has a problem where she was the "successful" wife and not as glamorous as - let's be honest - any of the other wives, and therefore everyone decides she's boring and stupid. Plus all the Anne Boleyn stans have massive hateboners because she "won" and they blame her for Anne Boleyn's death instead of the guy whose fault it actually was. (But also "the wife" is also treated as boring and stupid. Every time someone writes fiction about Loki, I'm like, "And how is Sigyn going to be the annoying conventional ball-and-chain who Just Doesn't Understand Him this time?" Even if the author claims to be feminist. Runemarks and its much less good sequel were awful about this.)
So a version of Jane Seymour where she manages to fit into the general historical view but also isn't treated by the author like an obedient wife with no personality is great. Especially because with this version, you also get the feeling that she has very strong opinions about the people around her that they would probably find very disconcerting.
I'm sure it bears no resemblance to what we know of the actual woman, though possibly because we don't have enough data. I will forgive historical inaccuracy in fiction when the fiction is good enough.
I have minimal interest in seeing the miniseries adaptation, though I find it amusing that Mark Rylance looks so much more like Thomas More than Thomas Cromwell. Man up and cast a fat guy as Cromwell, BBC you cowards.
Evidently hills I will die on include if an 18th century man has a years-long relationship with a woman he isn't married to, that doesn't mean he's some sort of manwhore, that means the 18th century had a much narrower definition of which women it was socially acceptable for an upper class man to get married to (even if people saw it as scandalous then).
So I'm reading The Mirror and the Light, because I read Wolf Hall, which I liked, and Bring Up the Bodies, which I thought wasn't as good as Wolf Hall, but I had moved on from Thomas Cromwell before the last book came out*, and Bring Up the Bodies wasn't good enough that I felt like I really had to read The Mirror and the Light anyway. But recently I was thinking that I needed to watch/read A Man for All Seasons, which made me want to read The Mirror and the Light, since A Man for All Seasons is a very romanticized portrayal of Thomas More (that honestly is probably less about More than about us, or us in the 50s anyway) and Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy is a flattering portrayal of Cromwell and a very unflattering portrayal of More in the first book. (He's dead in the second two.)
But there was something I read back when I was reading about Thomas Cromwell where someone was saying that people either claim he was an atheist or he was a religious Christian (and it often depended on whether they liked him or not) but in fact he couldn't have been an atheist because sane people weren't atheists in the 1500s. It would be like being a flat-earther today. And he may not have been a nice person, but he certainly wasn't a lunatic conspiracy theorist. Which was not something I had thought of before.
And while this was less true in the 18th century, because I think you did have some intellectuals who were actual atheists (though I haven't actually read them, so they could have been more like George Mallory who said he wasn't Christian but what he actually meant was that he didn't like church and actually he believed in Jesus, so only not a Christian to other Christians), but I think the default belief that you had if you didn't super care about religion and lived in England in the 18th century (assuming you weren't Jewish) was that Jesus was son of God who had been sent to earth to absolve the sins of everyone who accepted him as savior, in the same way that if you don't super care about science your default belief is still that the earth is round because that's what everyone around you believes. (The fact that the main tenet of Christianity is unprovable and the fact that the earth is round has been proven multiple times is beside the point, because most people believe it not because they looked up the evidence or proved it themselves but because it's what all sensible people believe, which is more efficient and usually better than proving everything for yourself, in about the same way as it generally being a bad idea to roll your own crypto.)
*Though not before I had also read Ford Madox Ford's Fifth Queen trilogy, which I both genuinely liked and also found unintentionally hilarious because evidently Ford Madox Ford was one of the turn of the 20th century Brits who all got super into Catholicism (because it was pretty? idk), so he made Katherine Howard a tall, pre-Raphaelite-looking, pious Latin scholar, which of course bears no resemblance to the real Katherine Howard.
We'll see if it will actually get fully read, or if it will join my piles of books that I mean to read, but I realized that Peebles would possibly be a good name for the cat I've just accepted as my new overlord. (The alternatives are Tarquin, because the other cat also has an upper-class twit name and they would match, and he sort of looks like a Tarquin, and Simcoe, because he doesn't really look like a Simcoe, but by about midnight of the night I brought him home, he had knocked a (dead) plant off a table, deliberately tipped the water bowl over, and yanked the top of one of my earrings out and then bit me when I tried to pry his mouth open to make sure he hadn't swallowed it (fortunately he hadn't, otherwise his first night with me would have involved a trip to the kitty ER), so he acts like a Simcoe. Also, it's hard to tell whether his blank blank stare is the blank blank stare of evil or the blank blank stare of stupidity. Also, he's large and ginger.)
Peebles the person seems likable, actually, if maybe a little prim, but I have a feeling a lot of 18th century people would come off as slightly prim to us, despite the licentious reputation of the period. I'd have tea with him, though I'm not sure he'd have tea with me.
He also managed to turn on the faucet so he could drink from it.
The other cat just steps on my nine-month-old nipple piercing and has smelly farts, so a mere novice in the field of chaos.
Also I wandered back over to reddit (in theory to look at the piercing subreddits but they're being boring) and it's Bi-Men-Who-Claim-Bi-Women-Are-All-Lying-Straight-Girls-And-Then-Whine-About-Biphobia-o'clock. Again. (What's also fun is going into one of the bi subreddits and seeing multiple bi guys and one bi girl claim that most bi girls are faking it to be cool and then seeing everyone dogpile the one woman for being biphobic and ignore the men. Queer men are just as likely to be sexist assholes as straight men and less likely to be called on it because everyone's still up Edward Carpenter's ass over a hundred years later. I swipe left on any girl who says she dates everyone except cishet dudes because I can't deal with that level of performative dishonesty. Like, come on, David Garnett wasn't magically less of an entitled cheating asshole who felt he should be able to sleep with any woman he wanted because he was just made like that but his wives should be faithful to him because he also dated Duncan Grant (who he also cheated on constantly, I think pretty much entirely with women).*
Also this specific dude had a bunch of physical and mental health issues and all the partners that he mentioned were female, which are fine by themselves but those are also exactly the characteristics that get women told they're actually lying or delusional straight girls, so he should maybe really tone it down about bi women. Not that anyone in the queer community seems to notice that kind of hypocrisy.)
*If I ever go troll AITA, it's going to be by posting stuff David Garnett (and Robert Graves) actually did. ("My (50M) ex-bf (57M) and his (mostly) platonic life partner(63F) aren't speaking to me because I want to marry their daughter(24F) (who still doesn't know my ex-bf is her father) who I literally saw being born, and who I started dating when my wife(49F) was dying of cancer and they think this is inappropriate. I think they're being unreasonable because we really love each other. AITA?")
The Guardian review of Garnett's biography linked off his wikipedia is glorious, incidentally. I bought the book because of it, but it turned out to not be as funny as the review because the author took him too seriously. "Bunny did nothing wrong!" Bunny should have been neutered.
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"Hangings are definitely not funny...I'm just glad you didn't have to experience them first hand....by watching yourself hang."
Ok, actually he would start out agreeing with it, but by the end he'd be thoroughly confused about how hangings in the Old West worked. Full length mirror at every execution?
We'll see if it will actually get fully read, or if it will join my piles of books that I mean to read, but I realized that Peebles would possibly be a good name for the cat I've just accepted as my new overlord. (The alternatives are Tarquin, because the other cat also has an upper-class twit name and they would match, and he sort of looks like a Tarquin, and Simcoe, because he doesn't really look like a Simcoe, but by about midnight of the night I brought him home, he had knocked a (dead) plant off a table, deliberately tipped the water bowl over, and yanked the top of one of my earrings out and then bit me when I tried to pry his mouth open to make sure he hadn't swallowed it (fortunately he hadn't, otherwise his first night with me would have involved a trip to the kitty ER), so he acts like a Simcoe. Also, it's hard to tell whether his blank blank stare is the blank blank stare of evil or the blank blank stare of stupidity. Also, he's large and ginger.)
Peebles the person seems likable, actually, if maybe a little prim, but I have a feeling a lot of 18th century people would come off as slightly prim to us, despite the licentious reputation of the period. I'd have tea with him, though I'm not sure he'd have tea with me.
