#anti Hilary Mantel

[oldshrewsburyian]

From behind the papist virgin with her silver shoes there creeps another woman, poor, her feet bare and calloused, her swarthy face plastered with the dust of the road. Her belly is heavy with salvation and the weight drags and makes her back ache.

The Mirror and the Light, Hilary Mantel

#16th-century anti-catholicism yes but/and i continue to be obsessed with mantel's writerly imagination #the mirror and the light #hilary mantel #the way she writes about theology fascinates me #as well as the way she writes about history obviously #[insert quip about 16th-century English history being inseparable from Anglican wrangling] #book quotes

[poniatowskaja]

Henry Tudor confirmed for #anti makeup king

#this is a joke post #obviously Henry was abusive with a very bad attitude to women #anti makeup #Hilary Mantel

[sprachgitter]

on storytelling and repetition

“...the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in. Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to know again.”

— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)

“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present we can’t give him.”

— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017

“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement, more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition: the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us. Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”

— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021

#web weaving #quote compilation #shakespeare #romeo and juliet #Hilary Mantel #arundhati roy #valzhyna mort #excerpt #on poetry #on storytelling #god of small things

[liesmyth]

nine people you'd like to know better

tagged by @evilwomanenjoyer, @happywastedyears, @pontipines, @maddenedbythesstars, thank you all

last song listened to: obsessed by Olivia Rodrigo. the grip this Gen Z girl with early 00s nostalgia vibes has on me...

favourite colour: RED

currently watching: sports?? waiting for IWTV & HOTD season 2

sweet/savoury/spicy: savoury> sweet > spicy

relationship status: single

current obsession: tbh I need a new hyperfixation to consume me! I'm relatively un-obsessed right now. very dull place to be.

last thing you googled: the exact wording to Smash Mouth's comment about DJ Khaled's anti-pussy-eating ways just so I could make a half-funny crack in the tags of this post. just roll with it

ships you like: SO many. If there's antagonism and power dynamics I'm into it

first ship ever: Vegeta/Bulma from DBZ. obviously.

favourite childhood book: Probably Eragon. I can't stress enough how much better the Italian translation was than the original version

currently reading: Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel & Mademoiselle de Maupin by Theophile Gautier

currently craving: fresh oranges. Unfortunately I only have an apple in my bag

tagging @moscca, @diosapate, @monstrousgourmandizingcats, @lvsifer, @tony-buddenbrook, @regina-del-cielo, @ghibli, @highladyluck, @katakaluptastrophy only if you guys want to!!

#tumblr games

[rughydrangea]

I made the decision a while ago for this to be a fandom space; I wanted it to be somewhere that I only posted about things that either made me happy or were completely meaningless. In my own life I spend a lot of time reading about the world and feeling great despair and trying to rouse myself out of my despair to do something (today was productive; I called and yelled at my senators' voicemails about Gaza and set up a recurring donation to Meduza), and I didn't want that to bleed over onto here.

I don't even know what I can say about Navalny. Last Thursday I flew out to Las Vegas to a professional conference--a large group of people who study Eastern Europe/Eurasia, a large number of whom are Russian citizens. On Friday morning, I woke up, read the news as I always do first thing, and felt something inside me break. Navalny rose to national prominence around the time I started getting serious about Russia, and he was a constant to me. In the past three years, again and again I was overwhelmed by his courage, and his ability to keep on joking and smiling and dictating memes to his social media people even as he suffered under such inhumane conditions. It turned out he meant even more to me than I thought, because the idea that he isn't here anymore, that he won't get to see the wonderful future Russia that he believed in and that I hope for with every fiber of my being hurts too much to bear.

In a way I was lucky that this happened when I was surrounded by Slavists, by Russians. On Friday afternoon there was a reading and Q&A by the opposition journalist Elena Kostyuchenko. The second question in the Q&A was asked by a middle aged man, who stood up and said, "Is there no hope left?" Her answer was quite beautiful ("There is still hope, but we must create it ourselves"), but what really stood out to me was the constant sound of sniffling, including from myself. Everyone was crying.

That evening there was a meeting (when that English word is used in Russian, it typically means a political gathering or protest). I live in a small town that is three hours away from the closest major city, so never have the opportunity to attend meetings. I went. It was in front of the Bellagio; in order to get there, I had to make my way through a luxury shopping mall and a large chunk of the hotel's casino. Once I was outside, there was a Lunar New Year celebration, and then finally, a small group of Russians, holding signs with slogans like Путин - убийца (Putin is a murderer) and the white-blue-white opposition flag. I had no sign and felt out of place, but settled in for a bit. Another woman from the conference got in an argument with a local Russian who was evidently anti-Putin (thus his presence) but somehow pro-Trump. It was a fittingly surreal experience for a surreal day.

On Saturday evening there was an impromptu poetry reading. People read out poems written in Navalny's honor, and other pieces of contemporary political writing, and shared their grief and fear for their relatives still in Russia. I have always been an easy crier, and though I was not alone in crying then, I felt like I was doing something wrong--nobody in my family is in danger from Putin's government. A woman afterwards said it was good that I cry so easily, it means I have a soft heart. I don't know that I think it's a good thing. There's a Hilary Mantel line: "You must thrive in spite of yourself; and so that you may do it, God takes out your heart of flesh, and gives you a heart of stone." I feel like I've been waiting for my heart of stone for 33 years, but it's nowhere to be seen. Maybe that's why I'm not exactly thriving.

I've always resisted communal grief. I thought I had permanently ruptured my relationship with my mother when I skipped my grandmother's memorial, but I couldn't face the prospect of sharing my grief with anyone, not even my family. It was too personal for that. But obviously I didn't know Navalny personally, and my grief for him is tied up in my grief for Russia, this country that I love so much and that I want to see free and happy and peaceful and kind the way I believe it can be. And Navalny did too, and never stopped fighting for it. Even when it killed him. Never for a second could I think of this as a personal loss. It's a loss we share. I feel lucky that I was able to feel that in a community.

(I felt this even more strongly when I briefly ventured into English-language commentary from the intellectuals of the internet (lol), who either didn't get why this was a big deal or didn't care because they know that Navalny was aligned with right-wing movements at the beginning of his career and apparently that is all that matters. I would never dream of defending his flirtation with Russian nationalism, but to act as though nothing that came after (even though was came after was the vast majority of his career) mattered, and to ignore the fact that he turned away from those nationalist movements is just complete bullshit and it makes me so angry. He practiced self-improvement, I thought that was a good thing. But no, I guess only saints are worthy of being mourned on Al Gore's internet.)

Today I woke up and watched Yulia Navalnaya's video. It's here, I highly recommend you watch it if you haven't already. I'm in awe of her strength, her anger, and her love. I made my advanced Russian students watch the whole video and translate it, I had my first years watch the ending with English subtitles. For my second years, I couldn't watch it again, but we listened to a song, "This will pass," by the group Pornofilmy. It's a protest song, and so fucking beautiful (it was my number one song on my Spotify unwrapped last year lol). "This will pass / what a black era has befallen us / but in the distance appears to me / the forgotten light of living hope / this will certainly pass!"

I just couldn't pretend to my students that everything was normal. As students of Russian language, too, they have to understand how important all of this is. Even though I started crying in every class, yikes. I know there's nothing more awkward than a crying teacher, but I still can't believe it. I still can't accept it. I am going to try to do what he encouraged: I won't give up, I won't do nothing. I will do my best to act, as I can, as an American (what I can do is different than if I were Russian, and my responsibilities are different, since my government commits its own evils).

Congrats if you made it to the end! The horrors of this world are too many to count, but as someone who truly loves Russia with all my soul, this fucking hurts.

#1 #2 #3 #4 #5 #real life #russia cannot be understood with the mind alone

[fideidefenswhore]

mbti for tudor book authors

kate emerson: you are a pick-me.

hilary mantel: you have a subscription to the spectator.

diane haeger: you have mommy issues.

vanora bennet: you have ‘anne boleyn anti’ in your header.

#i am meaner than OP . #but credit to OP and also they are the bee's knees <3 #swore haeger and emerson were the same person omg but i guess not...... #very similar styles is coincidence then ig #diane WHAT did margery wentworth ever do for you... #*to you #free my tudor mother in laws of henry viii from their circle of hell (elizabeth boleyn's characterization in the TOBG novel... WHY THIS ) #there have literally been like maybe two or three well rounded and plausible and sympathetic elizabeth boleyns (vasoli; rae; #and g lawrence) #IMAGINE HOW TIRED WE ARRRE #(even mantel's margery is weirdly borderline abusive by implication...? #that scene with the gablehood was so dark. she wrote some weird stuff) #(cannot tell if mantel's mommy issues or distaste for 'more modest' dress for women orrr what that was but it sure happened #and it was weird af)

[justforbooks]

Dame Hilary Mantel, who has died aged 70 after suffering a stroke, was the first female author to win the Booker prize twice, which she did for the first two volumes in her epic trilogy of the life of Thomas Cromwell, Wolf Hall (2010) and Bring Up the Bodies (2012). The novels, which collectively weigh in at about 2,000 pages, have sold 5m copies worldwide, were made into an acclaimed BBC series (2015) staring Mark Rylance, and adapted by Mantel herself for the RSC stage version (2014), a process that she loved. The trilogy culminated with The Mirror and the Light (2020) and the death of Cromwell; it turned out to be her final novel. All told in the present tense, the novels constitute a feat of immersive storytelling and a monumental landmark in contemporary fiction.

Before Cromwell, Mantel had written nine novels, including A Place of Greater Safety (1992), about the French Revolution; Beyond Black (2005), a characteristically dark and idiosyncratic tale of a medium in Aldershot; a memoir, Giving up the Ghost (2003); and three collections of short stories. Although she received good reviews, her sales were modest and none of her novels had even been longlisted for the Booker. “I felt very much like a niche product, very much a minority interest,” she said in an interview with the Guardian in 2020. But it was only with Cromwell and her decision “to march on to the middle ground of English history and plant a flag”, as she put it, that she found a huge readership. It was the novel she had been waiting all her career to write.

Born Hilary Thompson in Glossop, a village in Derbyshire, she was the daughter of working-class Catholic parents with Irish ancestry who had moved to Manchester; her mother, Margaret (nee Foster), like her mother before her, had left school to work in a mill when she was only 14. Hilary’s father was Henry Thompson, but she took her surname from her mother’s second husband, Jack Mantel.

Hers was not a happy childhood. “The story of my childhood is a complicated sentence that I’m always trying to finish, to finish and put behind me,” she wrote in Giving up the Ghost. If she were to give it a pigment, she continued, it would be “a faded, rain-drenched crimson, like stale and drying blood”.

When she was six, a man called Jack had come for tea, she wrote. “One day Jack comes for tea and doesn’t go home again.” The neighbours gossiped and children at school teased her about their living arrangements.

They all lived together until her mother and two younger brothers moved to a semi-detached house in Romiley with Jack. She never saw her father again. “My childhood ended so, in the autumn of 1963, the past and the future equally obscured by the smoke from my mother’s burning boats,” she said. Until she was 12, she was a devout Catholic, and she went to Harrytown Convent school, Romiley.

She met her husband, Gerald McEwen, when they were 16, marrying in 1973, the year that she graduated from Sheffield University with a law degree. Instead of becoming a barrister as she had planned, she got a job in a department store and started reading about the French Revolution. She said she never thought of becoming a novelist until she “actually picked up a pen to become one” and even then it was only because she felt she had missed her chance to become a historian. She started her first novel, A Place of Greater Safety in, 1974, when she was 22. It would be two decades before it was published. In 1977 she and Gerald were sent to Botswana for his work as a geologist. She started teaching, but in her head she was always in 1790s France, writing whenever she could.

The impulse to write grew out of her sense that something was seriously wrong with her. While she was at university she started having terrible pains, but was told they were psychological and was prescribed antidepressants and anti-psychotic drugs. There followed years of pain, misdiagnosis and denial. It was only in a library in Botswana that she self-diagnosed severe endometriosis. When she was 27 and back in England over Christmas, she collapsed and underwent major surgery at St George’s hospital, which was then at Hyde Park Corner, central London, “having my fertility confiscated and my insides rearranged”, as she described it.

But it was recovering from the operation that cemented her determination to write. Unable to find a publisher for A Place of Greater Safety – it was not a great time to be trying to publish historical fiction – she shrewdly changed tack, forming what she called “a cunning plan”, and started on a contemporary novel, Every Day Is Mother’s Day, which was immediately snapped up in 1985, followed a year later by a sequel, Vacant Possession.

While her literary career was finally taking off, her marriage was foundering, and a year after her operation she and Gerald divorced, with Mantel returning to Britain. Gerald also came home, and barely two years later they remarried so that he could take up a job in Saudi Arabia. They moved to Jeddah in 1982, and this provided the inspiration for her fourth novel, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988). A Place of Greater Safety was published four years later.

After returning to Britain, for many years she was a lead book reviewer for the Guardian, as well as film critic for the Spectator. Although sitting on various committees – the Royal Society of Literature, the Society of Authors and the Advisory Committee for Public Lending Right – and teaching, she never saw herself as part of any literary set, and was always slightly apart from her famous contemporaries such as Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. The publication of The Giant, O’Brien in 1998 and Beyond Black in 2005 saw her begin to break out of being “a literary novelist” – at least in terms of sales.

And then came Cromwell. It was no small irony that after years of not being able to publish her first historical novel, she found fame with a book set during the reign of Henry VIII. “It was as if after swimming and swimming you’ve suddenly found your feet are on ground that’s firm,” she said. “I knew from the first paragraph that this was going to be the best thing I’d ever done.”

The debilitating pain and periods of ill health of her early years never left her. And in 2010, shortly after winning the Booker prize for the first time, she was back in hospital for yet more operations, a period she chronicled in a diary for the London Review of Books. “Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false,” she wrote.

After the success of Wolf Hall, she and Gerald moved to the Devon seaside town of Budleigh Salterton, which she had visited when she was 16 and where she had promised herself she would one day live. Gerald became her manager and was always her first reader. Never afraid of long hours, she liked to write first thing in the morning, and when she was deeply immersed in a novel she often would write in bursts during the night. She still had many notebooks full of ideas and projects she wanted to begin.

In 2013 she caused a minor outcry in a speech at the British Museum in which she described Catherine Middleton as a personality-free “shop window mannequin”, drawn from her fascination with public perceptions of the female body, and she wrote a powerful essay for the Guardian to mark the 20th anniversary of the death of Princess Diana. She was made a dame in 2014.

As her agent of nearly 40 years, Bill Hamilton, said: “You always have to remember how much her background and ferocious intelligence made her an outsider, and how her chronic ill health made her a stranger even to her own body. In her writing she had to invent everything from scratch. She wrote eloquently about how hard it was to know what each new sentence had to contain, and what surprises lay just round the corner, like the presences that populate her books: ghosts, and the ghosts of what the future might hold.”

Mantel did much to encourage other writers, and was generous with her time for anyone she met professionally. Equally, Hamilton said: “When success arrived she enjoyed it gleefully, as she knew it was so hard-earned.”

Gerald survives her.

🔔 Hilary Mary Mantel, author, born 6 July 1952; died 22 September 2022

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Hilary Mary Mantel #in memoriam

[notsosilentsister]

If it's not an imposition I'd be really interested to hear about your other favourite authors? I found Hilary Mantel (and possibly a few others?) through your Tumblr + I know you have great taste

Oh wow, thanks! I'm still recovering from my surgery, and today the pain killers seem to work a bit less well than yesterday, so I can really use some cheering up!

My current favourites, in no particular order:

Susanna Clarke. Is there anything she can't do? Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell was such a doorstopper, and Piranesi is the height of narrative economy. I'm still utterly enchanted. It's a hymn to scientific inquiry without ever playing it out against myth, art, faith and ritual, a sort of Anti-Robinsonade - here too, we have someone torn out of his own world, having to survive in strange surroundings, entirely left to their own devices, but while Robinson aims to conquer, Piranesi just wants to understand/connect. One of the most likeable protagonists I've encountered in all of literature in quite a while. And the vibes are impeccable. I think Susanna Clarke is always so good at setting the scene, she has a knack for killer imagery, and always hits the right note with the prose style. It's never just style for its own sake, it's always in service of getting you in the right frame of mind for the story.

Lucia Berlin. Wrote mostly short stories with an autobiographical bent. And what a life she had! Very adventurous, upwardly and downwardly socially and geographically mobile, a true bohemian. Reading Lucia Berlin always makes me feel like I need to travel more (definitely) and get some divorces (a bit). (What it actually made me do, was go back into teaching. Lucia Berlin had a lot of jobs - one of her short story collections is called A Manual for Cleaning Women, and one of those jobs was teaching). Her life was often hard (traumatic childhood, dysfunctional parents, sexual assaults, addiction, health problems…), at times brutal - I mean, one thing reading her definitely didn't inspire in me is any curiosity about drugs - at times glamorous and exhilarating, sure, but the lows are very low. She has so many awful encounters and yet never closes herself off to connection, completely clear-eyed about the pain it might bring. Even when she takes you to the depths of despair, she never numbs to her surroundings; she has an eye for the beauty in hell.

Shirly Jackson. I'm not usually a great reader of horror, but I will always make an exception for Shirly Jackson. Another great one for narrative economy. Maximal emotional punch for minimal word count. Great at exposing the blood curdling menace in convention. Honestly, I don't think I could stand it, if I had more of an inclination towards social anxiety, but even so, I think she'll hit anyone who's ever ended up on the wrong side of a group dynamic, and who hasn't? At times deceptively charming, delightfully excentric, cosily conventional, strangely seductive, to better set you up for betrayal, guaranteed to haunt you, long after you've closed the book.

Marlen Haushofer. Maybe I am a bit of a reader of horror after all? It's a fairly similar sort of horror too - the slow poison of corruption through civilization - but usually without explicit supernatural elements (the exception being The Wall, probably her most famous novel anyway). I discovered her as a kid - she also wrote quite a bit for children - and then got majorily back into her during the lockdowns, when she seemed to me like the writer of the hour. I wrote about that at some length here.

Jennifer Egan. She always does something that interests me. Maybe it's a bit of formal metafictional playfulness - I thought the powerpoint chapter in A Visit from the Goon Squad was actually the most moving chapter, definitely not just a gimmick to me (but maybe the sibling dynamic just hits a button for me) - maybe it's just her choice of topic. Look at Me is a downright visionary novel about the rise of influencers on social media, written before Facebook and Insta and the costs and benefits of erotic capital, something which I of course would only know from books and therefore find reasonably fascinating (also a bit about terrorism, written before 9/11, but I found that sublot less compelling); Manhattan Beach is about the first female diver at the Brooklyn Naval Ward, getting drawin into the New York demi-monde while investigating the disappearance of her father during World War II. She's sometimes criticized for writing a bit too much with an eye to effect (the metafictional stuff can be read as pretentious; Manhattan Beach is going for Grande Cinema), but I like that about her. I think you can alway count on Jennifer Egan to find an illuminating angle.

George Eliot. I usually don't have strong opinions about shipping, but "Dorothea/ Ladislaw OTP" is one of the topics I could improvise an hour-long lecture on at the slightest provocation. It's also why I have eternal beef with Henry James, who apparently went on record claiming that Middlemarch would have been a better novel if Dorothea had ended up with Lydgate. (Can you imagine? How hard can anyone miss the point? Might as well say Peggy should have ended up with Don.) I also don't usally worry much about spoilers, because I'm not generally in it for the plot twists. But George Eliot is a case where I really make a point of going in unspoilt. I think she's just the best at leading her characters towards genuinely difficult choices, and even if it's quite clear, what the right choice would be, making you quite unsure if the character can make it, or if it came to that, if you could. My one quibble with her is that I think she has a very weird idea of what makes one suited for a career in politics, but maybe I'm just too jaded.

George R.R. Martin. This started out as an ASOIAF-fanblog; it would be weird not to mention him. It's also a bit weird to mention him though - there was a period in my life when I was positively obsessed with ASOIAF, true, but I feel zero inclination to read anything else by George R.R. Martin. Not because he's a bad writer or because I resent him for not finishing the series - I clearly think he's highly skilled; I could not put up with subpar prose over so many pages, and I can live with unfinished work - it's just not usually my genre, and I feel that the special circumstance that contributed to my ASOIAF-obsession cannot be repeated. First, the series got some hype when there was talk of a TV-show, and I actually sometimes like jumping on a bandwagon. I just rarely do, because they're usually not my speed. But this one turned out to be, and I was excited at an opportunity to join the water-cooler conversation. And then I kinda got in too deep, because I was just working on my second thesis, and was desperately procrastinating. This probably sounds like me being overly defensive. It's hard nowadays not to feel a bit like a sucker as an ASOIAF-fan. We know there's not much of a chance Martin will ever finish the series, and we know how the show turned out. No one has much sympathy for the disappointment - the general tenor seems to be: What did you expect? It was always this stupid. I agree that there's much I dislike about the show that's actually already there in the novels (eg. gratituous sexual violence, half-heartedly rationalized by the pseudo-historicity) and I won't defend that.

But let me go on record here, I really don't think it was always this stupid. It had interesting things to say about chivalry, honor, different leadership styles, forms of social organisation, family dysfunction, dealing with trauma, propaganda, the power of narratives, institutional failure, collective action, risk management, the cost of lies. It had multi-dimensional, psychologically plausible, dynamic characters. It had tons of forshadowing, and carefully constructed set-ups, and well-executed pay-offs. It had the most shocking twists, that still felt inevitable. And I think Martin has a really good ear for dialogue - eg. he has more than one way to make a character sound witty (something writers of witty characters often seem to struggle with; everyone just ends up the same kind of snarky, which quickly grates on me) - eg.Tyrion's wit is different from Olennas, and even Stannis has a blink-and-you-miss it dry sort of wit. Martin also has that Dickensian knack for distinguishing characters through speech patterns and catch phrases, which is a bit gimmicky, but hey, it works. And you need all the tricks at your disposal with such a huge cast. He was (maybe intermittently still is) trying to do something very ambitious, and I will always admire him for that, even if he likely never pulls it off.

#susanna clarke #lucia berlin #shirley jackson #marlen haushofer #jennifer egan #george eliot #george rr martin #roseblight

[ameliarating]

I heard a Dominican Friar speak up about anti-Catholic bias in Hilary Mantel's work (and a bit of research confirms it) and how he and other British Catholics he knows have experienced upticks in the old English style anti-Catholic attitudes he's hoped has been in the past

and it's really just a reminder for me that we'll never catch all examples of bias and bigotry in the works we consume, especially when they touch on community dynamics so very far removed from us, and that it's not on us to stop consuming media, of course, but just keeping open ears to listen to people affected

anyways, never going to interact with Wolf Hall in quite the same way again

[elizabethan-memes]

I am so Tired of defending Thomas More I am so Tired but I keep seeing Bad Takes that I feel obligated to respond to and uhhhhhh I Want flawed Thomas More in historical fiction I Want That Very Much but please pretty please can we give him the flaws he actually had in real life and not the flaws we assume he had because religious fundamentalism and Catholic stereotypes.

#thomas more #tudor memes #history memes #im sorry im like this #wolf hall #Hilary Mantel #anti hilary mantel

[megandzane]

You know you fucked up when you have Republicans and anti-monarchists saying they love and miss Meghan.

#Hilary Mantel is right #I’m not forgetting that she shaded Meg a few times early on but she seems to just be anti monarchy

[grandhotelabyss]

—Daniel Immerwahr, “A New History of World War II”

Speaking of Immerwahr, as I was in my Dune post, here he is in The Atlantic—surprisingly. I think of The Atlantic as the house organ of refighting World War II. Even in their woke turn, heralded by the rise of Ta-Nehisi Coates, they sought to refurbish the “Good War” idea by moving it back a century to the Civil War, since the neoliberals and neoconservatives had worn out the World War II analogies in the 1990s and 2000s. 

Still, to demythologize World War II in this way—tantamount to desacralizing Hitler as the incarnation of metaphysical evil in modern history, as I think Old Nick (I mean Land) once called him—is to invite moral chaos, to strike at the foundation of the liberal world order. This was the point of my post about Milan Kundera and Toni Morrison when this year’s war first began. 

I think of how such gestures were received in what seemed like stabler times. My own touchstones are literary. Hilary Mantel’s rebuke of The English Patient comes to mind:  

Kip trains his rifle on the “English patient” and is reminded that no one quite knows who the man is.

“American, French, I don’t care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you’re an Englishman.”

It is a crude polemic, this, exploding into the final pages of the book. As Ondaatje has neglected or disdained or is disinclined to set up a mechanism to distinguish his views from those of his characters, we wonder whether he is speaking for himself. It is fashionable to pretend not to know why certain wars were fought: Does this incomprehension now stretch to World War II? Is there no truth that jumps out of its skin—white, brown, burnt—to embrace the postwar generation? 

To fight the reactionaries over the last decade or so, the liberals have armed themselves with the revolutionary tradition. After gratuitously insulting Corey Robin on the last episode of GPA, I sat down with the 2018 expanded edition of The Reactionary Mind and was reminded of what I found to be its appealing but debilitating simplicity a decade ago, even leaving his aside his obvious envy and longing, his libidinal attachment to the dynamism and creativity of the reactionary style. (The true homme de lettres will always prefer Burke to Paine, Nietzsche to Marx.) And yet, assigning “reactionary” without qualification to critics of the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions and to the partisans of the Old South in America is not only to tie the knot too tightly but even to imply a John Birch shadow book in which Robespierre, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and Obama all stand revealed as exemplars of one ideology. 

The revolutionary tradition has its own World War II mythos, of which Putin’s line about the Nazis in Ukraine is a remnant, but because of its anti-colonial aspect it was never going to be able to sustain the idea of Nazism’s novelty or uniqueness. There are two possible responses to the idea that Nazis are neither novel nor unique: to disown one’s own tradition as no better than Nazism or to accept Nazism as integral part of one’s own tradition. Between Immerwahr’s discourse on colonialism in The Atlantic and Richard Spencer’s EU flag-waving on Twitter, the liberal west is decomposing into incompatible ideologemes under the strain of the new century, while some of us—reared in the old regime—are just trying to hold on.

I’ve always liked The English Patient. Overheated rhetoric, sure, a lot of poetic misfires, though who by that era (or our own) had or has time for the Balzacian breadth Mantel demands in the stead of Ondaatje’s poetry? (I’ve never read any of Mantel’s long novels.) But when the heroine Hana writes home to her mother after Hiroshima, “From now on I believe the personal will forever be at war with the public,” she makes the novel’s real point, a point of the type literature exists to make if literature exists to make points, about the ironies and affects of private life amid the mythological clash of peoples, identities, and ideologies. “There is no such thing as the individual,” the righteous of all sects tell us. But it’s still the individual who has to live out the wars.

Of my older relatives who fought in World War II, the one who saw the most combat, my great uncle on my father’s side, was the one who suffered most: blown up behind German lines, his eye torn out, the left side of his face ripped open. Then, starving, infected, feverish, in agony, he was a prisoner of war. He had gone away excited to fight; he came back half shattered in body and mind. He never had a good word to say about the good war. In a memoir of the fighting he wrote for a VA psychiatrist to upgrade his veterans’ benefit claims in the 1970s—I have it here—he recounts his time as a prisoner of the Germans:

They had us get out of the boxcars. They marched us through the dark tunnel. When we came out of the tunnel we saw a river. I think it was the Rhine River. There was a bridge and it was on its side but it was still standing. They marched us across the bridge, then up to a high ridge. On this ridge coming toward us was a young German soldier. He looked at us so pitifully. I said “Good Morning” to him in German. Then I said in German, “War is hell!” He agreed.

No Ondaatjean poeticisms, just the pathos and panache of Hemingway. When he died, my grandmother had the words TOO MUCH WAR carved into his tombstone.

#daniel immerwahr #michael ondaatje #hilary mantel #corey robin #world war ii #liberalism #literature #war

[the-dewofthesea]

a lovely anonymous person asked me:  Hey! I’m always on the lookout for new historical movies/series to watch. Do you have any recommendations? 🕯️

I’ve watched so many the past months, most of them you might probably already know, but here is a list of probably more things then anyone asked for. (ordered chronologically by time period, also includes non-english films/series)

based on real events: - Knightfall (2017-2019) Knights Templar 14th century - Kenau (2014) 1573, Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer defends Haarlem with her women army against the Spanish troops [Dutch] - Jamestown (2017-2019) 1619, women join men in the colony of Jamestown - Tulip Fever (2017) 17th century Dutch Tulip Mania - Michiel de Ruyter (2015) Dutch 17th century admiral [Dutch] - Frontier (2016 -) 18th century North American fur trade - Mr. Turner (2014) J.M.W. Turner, painter from the Romanticism - Gentleman Jack (2019-) Anne Lister, 19th century lesbian industrialist and landowner - Ammonite (2020) Mary Anning, 19th century female paleontologist - Insoumises (2019) Henriette Faber/Enriqueta Favez a female Swiss doctor working on Cuba lives life as a man [Spanish?] - Effie Gray (2014) Euphemia Gray, painter married to Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millias - Tesla (2020) Nikola Tesla, 19th century inventor - The English Game (2020) origins of modern football in England, 1870s - Charité (2017) hospital in Berlin, 1888 [German] - Elisa & Marcella (2019) first gay couple to marry in spain, 1901 [Spanish] - Mr Selfridge (2013-2016) Harry Gordon Selfridge, retail magnate  - Radioactive (2019) Marie Skłodowska Curie, physicist and chemist - 1917 (2019) WWI - Amelia (2009) Amelia Earhart, first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean, disappeared in 1937 - Professor Marston & the Wonder Women (2017) the creator of Wonder Woman   - Charité at War (2019) hospital in Berlin, WWII  [German] - Dunkirk (2017) WWII - A United Kingdom (2016) Secretse & Ruth Khama, heir to Bechuanaland (Botswana) - Hidden Figures (2016) NASA’s (1960s) female mathematicians  - Dreamgirls (2016) The Dreamettes, 1960/70s girl music group  - Loving (2016) 1967 U.S. Supreme Court case Loving vs. Virginia  - The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020) anti-vietnam war protests, 1969

based on fiction: - The Last Kingdom (2015-) by Bernard Cornwell (2004), 9th century - The King (2019) based on Henriad by Shakespeare, 15th century - Wolf Hall (2015) by Hilary Mantel (2009), 16th century  - The Miniaturist (2017) by Jessie Burton (2014), 17th century - Hoe duur was de suiker (2013) by Cynthia McLeod (1987) 18th century plantation in Suriname [Dutch] - Poldark (2015-2019) by Winston Graham (1945), 18th century  - Outlander (2014 -) by Diana Gabaldon (1991), 20th + 18th century - Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019) late-18th century painter in France - My Cousin Rachel (2017) by Daphne du Maurier (1951), 1830s   - The Beguiled (2017) by Thomas P. Cullinan (1966), USA civil war - Emma (2020) by Jane Austen (1815), Regency Period - Alias Grace (2017) by Margaret Atwood, murders in 19th century Canada - Little Women (2019) by Louisa May Alcott (1868), 19th century - The Paradise (2012-2013) by Émile Zola (1883), 19th century department store - Bridgerton (2020) by Julia Quinn (2000), Regency Period - Enola Holmes (2020) by Nancy Springer (2006), 1884

things about royalty: - Outlaw King (2018) Robert the Bruce, 14th century - Mary Queen of Scots (2018) Queen Mary of Scotland, 16th century  - The Favourite (2018) Queen Anne of England, 18th century - Catherine the Great (2019) Catherine II of Russia, 18th century - Victoria  (2016 -) Queen Victoria of Great Britain, 19th century - De Troon (2010) Dutch Royal House, 19th century [ Dutch] - The Last Czars (2019) Nicholas II, last emperor of Russia murdered 1918 - the Crown (2016 -) Queen Elizabeth II, 20th century

#blog #question #history

[faustandfurious]

Book asks: 😈👻🏰

😈 Favourite villain

This is a difficult one because so many of the villainous characters I like have elements of the anti-hero to them, or they end up joining forces with the heroes against the real Big Bad. I love Lord Asriel and Mrs Coulter from His Dark Materials, but despite the terrible things they do, they’re not really the villains in the end. Petyr Baelish from Game of Thrones is a corrupt, horrible man created by a corrupt, horrible political system in which the only way a man like him can get anywhere in life is by playing the game dirtier than everyone else combined. Fëanor and his sons are somewhere in the murky gray area between heroism and villainy.

Among those who are more unambiguously villainous, I like Lady Macbeth, Mephistopheles from Faust, the Chandrian from the Kingkiller Chronicle (if my fan theories about their background are true, that is), and the Witch-king of Angmar

👻 Favourite horror book

Dracula, without a doubt. I love the slow buildup, the epistolary format, the creeping sense of dread you get from the fragments and letters and newspaper clippings which enable you to see the larger picture being sketched before you while the characters themselves are still in the dark. What little I’ve read of modern horror makes the mistake of having too many monsters appear too early in the story. True horror, for me, is not the blood and gore and fangs, but the slow crawl from normal life into the uncanny valley.

🏰 Favourite historical fiction book

A Place Of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. It’s hilarious, tragic, chilling - all at once. It’s the kind of book where you want to highlight every passage to quote later because Mantel does stuff with sentences and ideas that you didn’t know was possible or allowed.

#book emoji asks #pranks #answered

[practicalmagicintuitions]

As a fellow spiritual practitioner I am extremely disappointed that you are sharing anti trans rhetoric as if it's a positive thing. I've never been able to fault your readings or the things you say about spiritual practices, but to know that you are will to suggest that transphobia is in any way a good thing is awful.

Trans people have never denied that sex is a thing, that chromosomes are a thing. Every trans person knows full well what they were assigned at birth, they just don't agree that's what they should have to spend the rest of their lives as.

TERF and GC dogma is not about freeing women it is about strictly defining what that means and not allowing anyone assigned female at birth to deviate from that, nor allowing anyone assigned male at birth to enter into it. They also discount the lives and experiences of all intersex people simply because they don't fit into the sex binary. They discount their existence completely.

The fact that you are apparently eager to align yourself with these people shows that you are not as spiritually evolved as you appear. You may know what you're talking about when it comes to spiritual matters but you are sorely lacking in spiritual clarity.

I am leaving my blog name visible, not asking anonymously, so that I cannot be accused of hiding. If you put this up on your blog and I receive harassment because of it...so be it.

That was part of a private conversation uou dont havw to know about but I will answer as I can:

How is anti trans if Hilary Mantel said she is proud of being a woman, have her pronounced she and it was changed WITHOUT her permission and asking her? Like seriously….

Answer me this about please and we can go on.

[jezabelofthenorth]

Hopefully this isn't controversial to anyone, but which shows/movies/books do you think portrayed the Six Wives and Henry VIII the best? Which do you think were the worst?

i think the tudors is actually pretty great overall, i’ve really changed my mind on it ten years after it’s run, it does fall into some bad tropes and oversimplification, but i’d recommend it to anyone

i love the two elizabeth movies, again, even if i have some issues with how they choose to dramatize history (robert dudley for one) i think it captures elizabeth as a near mythic figure

anne of the thousand days is my favourite portrayal of anne, i think it’s the best to show her charm, spirit and wit

shadow of the tower is amazing and it’s too bad you can only watch it in bad quality on youtube,

i love the virgin queen mini series with anne marie duff, it’s prob the most accurate on elizabeth’s life and i love how it captures her relationship with robert, also the one with helen mirren, she so great as elizabeth at the height of power

WOLF HALL, i know so people have issues with anne in it, and i get it and agree with that and i don’t like how hilary mantel has acted like she’s so above the tudors of pgregs and yes messes around with history just as much

i don’t think i need to get into how i don’t tsp or twp lol, i’ve said that enough

the most recent mary queen of scots movie is AWFUL, like not only deeply misogynistic and randomly homophobic, but also just a boring poorly made movie

the anonymous movie is bad soley on being anti-stratfordian nonsense but the way they portray elizabeth is CRIMINAL

#whiskey-cokenstuff