So I am going to be in London this weekend, which is the closing weekend of the British Museum’s massive Celts exhibit. I haven’t seen it, and it seems like the kind of thing I should … but I am not gonna.
I’m just … tired. Not necessarily overworked, but overstretched with some of the projects I am currently in the middle of. And I am sure (if there are even tickets left) that it would be great, but it would be mobbed and I would not find it relaxing.
Ridiculously, I sort of feel like I am failing by not going, but long experience has taught me that that is actually a pretty good sign I should not be..
That does not mean I am not going to do anything bloggy in London, so watch this space.
One of the regular events in my life as an inveterate cheap-book fiend is the sale at the Cambridge University Press bookshop. Today I was in town and I noticed it was on again, so in I went. Paperbacks are £3 and hardbacks are £7, which doesn’t sound like that great a deal until you think about how much academic books typically cost. Some of them are a bit dinged up or missing their dust jackets or whatever, but you can usually find good copies.
Anyway, I got some things I wanted at good prices, so that was good.
But the thing that really interests me about the sale is … it’s like a field full of rabbit holes. You’re looking at a shelf full of books, and you’ll see something like this:
Notes on Household Taste? Music from the Tang Court? Disability in the Orroman Arab World, 1500-1800? Ungulate Management in Europe? There was a book in there called “Defending the Correspondence Model of Truth.” I didn’t know it was under attack! Shit, I don’t even know what it is. There are a hundred opportunities to go off down some wild tangent on some topic that not only did I know nothing about, I didn’t even know existed.
As I have probably mentioned before, I have a tendency to collect neat stuff without any obvious use for it — I like replicas of historical documents, for instance, and people who buy me gifts also know that I like them. After acquiring it, I look for a chance to do something with it, but it doesn’t always come up. And now I have tutoring students who are studying WWII.
So, one of the ways I like to teach my students about history is through little roleplaying exercises. For instance, today we’re doing the Black Death, so I started out by asking them to imagine that they were physicians or members of a city government in 1348. I told them about the symptoms of this strange new disease and asked them to suggest its possible causes and some solutions we might use.
It took some people a little while to get into character.
Me: So what could be causing this illness?
Student: It’s fleas.
Me: What are you talking about? How could fleas spread a disease?
Student: Well, the bacteria …
Me: The what? Stop making up words!
Student (getting it): Maybe God is angry with us?
Me: Oooh! Good point, that could totally be it.
And that is how I wound up writing a list headed SOLUTIONS on the whiteboard, beneath which I wrote in a fine, clear hand in green dry-erase marker KILL THE JEWS. I have to tell you, that is not how I envisioned spending ten seconds of my life at any point, but I can’t deny it’s relevant. We actually had a pretty good brief discussion about medieval European antisemitism and, basically, what the hell that was all about, sparked by a student question. So in the end it was a good thing, but definitely a weird and awkward one.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I thought I’d take a look at 2014’s A Little Chaos, a film about, of all things, the creation of the gardens of Versailles directed by the late Alan Rickman.
During my MA I did some stuff on the history of gardening, formal and landscape, but it’s been a long time since I gave it any thought. There was a time when gardens were an important way of communicating something about their patrons; these days not so much, but one could draw analogies, I’m sure. They were also displays of military might, which is kind of a weird concept — but organised large-scale construction and earth-moving played a big role in warfare in the 17th century. Parts of the gardens of Versailles were, in fact, built by units of the French army.
Aaaanyway, Sabine de Barra (Kate Winslet) is the irrepressible innovator of the gardening world, while Andre Le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts) represents the establishment. He hires her to work on Versailles despite her controversial designs, there’s lots of scenery-porn, Maria Theresa dies, Sabine has a tragic backstory, they begin to fall in love, etc., etc. He has a wife but it’s OK because she’s a dreadful woman. The King takes a personal interest in her because, being Alan Rickman, he’s a man of great soul instead of a Protestant-hating tyrant. And Andre Le Notre’s not 60 or whatever.
Good performances, of course; Stanley Tucci is fun as the Duc d’Orleans, Rickman is great, etc., etc. He doesn’t actually have a huge part, but he gives it plenty of the ol’ gravitas.
It’s not a very … satisfying … film, other than visually. It’s got all the sort of thing you would expect in a film about that place and time, with the hats and the dresses and the wigs and the big engineering works and lots and lots of plants. But as to narrative tension, not a huge amount.
What they’ve done with the history is interesting — the idea that gardening is culturally and politically relevant could do with a little more emphasis, perhaps, and of course Sabine de Barra herself is a fictional character, and somehow it all makes the whole thing seem a little … diffuse. It has a lot of historical stuff in it, but its relationship to its historical context is not always clear. I think the 17th-century building site is actually the most interesting part of the whole thing, just because of all its little details.
Also Kate Winslet gets soaked in a downpour and falls in a body of water, because of course she does.
It’s reasonably diverting, it’s got lots of good performances and it’s on UK Netflix; I’m not sure it necessarily carries a lot of weight as a historical film other than the usual pageantry, but I still enjoyed it.
I am really hoping to see Dragon Blade, speaking of weight as a historical film.
It’s only been over the last few years that I’ve started to admit this to myself: I have an acquisitive nature. I’d been denying it for a long time because I’m not by nature a collector. I seldom care about having the complete set of something, and when I do it’s usually just by way of a mild curiosity. I will pick up the issues of the Wagner/Grant/Breyfogle Detective Comics run that I’m missing, but I won’t pay a lot for them or go very far out of my way.
What this means is that my bookshelves have a certain magpie’s-nest quality about them. I suppose this relates in a way to what I was saying the other day about being a fox rather than a hedgehog.
I often feel guilty because I buy books faster than I can read them — or rather, I binge-buy cheap books (I am frugal in this as in all things) but can’t read eight of them at once, so some of them just never get looked at.
However, this has its upsides, too: for instance, with the news of Alan Rickman’s passing, I thought I’d try to watch his film A Little Chaos for next week’s Movie Monday, only I don’t know much about the historical period it’s set in. Then I realised I own a book on landscape gardening in 17th-century France. Bought it about 10 years ago, never read it other than to look at some of the pretty pictures, and have carried it through like five house moves. And now, finally, my foresight is rewarded.
You’re probably familiar with the distinction between foxes and hedgehogs — “the fox knows many tricks; the hedgehog knows only one, but it’s a good one.” Foxes are generalists, but hedgehogs are specialists.
I always sort of envisioned myself as a potential hedgehog. In many ways, the British system seems set up to produce hedgehogs — you apply to university in a specific subject, and students seem specialised relatively early in the secondary system compared to their counterparts in the US (the only other system I really know about, although I’ve seen a little of some others). And, of course, graduate education is specialised for everyone — as you continue, you know, as they say, more and more about less and less. And I went through that system like everyone else; by the end, I knew a huge amount about a very specific topic.
But outside academia, I was pulled in the opposite direction. I work as a teacher and tutor, so I spend a lot of time being called on to talk about subjects I’m sometimes only passingly familiar with. Here’s the stuff I’ll be dealing with this week, purely on the history side (I also tutor kids in English):
The legislation of the Long Parliament.
Cleopatra VII and her impact on Roman politics.
Anti-war messages in the popular culture of the late 1960s.
The Arab-Israeli conflict (twice).
Daily life in the early and high middle ages.
The first Gulf War (maybe, time permitting).
The Amritsar massacre.
I’ve also been working on the podcast I co-host, and it’s been a similar experience. So far we’ve talked about:
Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades.
The middle ages in general.
Science and superstition in Renaissance Italy.
Magna Carta.
Experimental archaeology.
Arthurian legend.
The invasions of 1066.
The Jacobite rising of 1745.
Occultism, folk dance and pop archaeology of the 1970s.
I never know what I’m going to get asked — we don’t really script our show ahead of time — so I try to be prepared!
Now, on the one hand this is a lot of work. But on the other hand it’s definitely working out my “ginning up a subject quickly” muscles, which is a very useful thing. It also allows me to mentally justify buying books on pretty much whatever since they could one day be useful.
So like every other dork in the world I have been listening lately to the hit musical Hamilton, which tells the story of Alexander Hamilton, the guy on the $10 bill. If you pay attention to this stuff, you will know that it is a huge hit, blends hip-hop with Broadway, yadda yadda. And, of course, it’s about a historical figure, which makes it particularly interesting to me.
Hamilton is particularly interesting because he’s one of those people where I think most people know who he was but I doubt any of us who aren’t really serious students of American history have a sense of what he was like, which is what the musical really appears to be about.
Now, me being me, and having a heart of stone, I like the political songs best. Obviously “The Room Where It Happens” is great, but I’m currently enjoying “Washington on Your Side.”
Let’s show these Federalists who they’re up against / Southern motherfuckin’ Democratic-Republicans! is a great line.
Of course, the play tends to elide much of its history — for instance, it has the Burr-Hamilton duel take place right after the 1800 Presidential election (which is also a fun song) rather than several years later. And this elision has some weird effects. For example, in “The World Was Wide Enough,” Burr sings:
Now I’m the villain in your history / I was too young and blind to see / I should have known, I should have known the world was wide enough / for both Hamilton and me
OK, fair enough, but I suspect “too young” is an artefact of casting a handsome actor in his mid-30s to play the part.
Burr, by contrast, was 48 at the time of the duel — something that the narrative of the play makes clear when Hamilton describes their “thirty years of disagreements.”
Anyway, I’m not nitpicking — that’s the nature of historical adaptation and telling a story that takes place over a long period. What are they gonna do, run off and subtly change the makeup every time they get the chance?
What I’m curious about is how this is going to affect public perception of Hamilton. In cases where there’s only really one work of popular media about a character, we often see that our sense of who that person was — and our sort of instinctive sense of whether we like them — comes from that portrayal. I think that goes double for someone like Hamilton, a guy who people kind of assumed was just another boring pillar of patriotic virtue.
The other really interesting thing about this is that the portrayal of Washington, as far as I can tell, is very much within tolerances: unbending moral rectitude, far-seeing concern, etc. Some things you can’t mess with.
I think that I’d like to see the early US done as some disastrous third-world post-independence shambles, which is what it must have looked like to contemporary British observers.
I picked up a bunch of Osprey books for cheaps in a local charity shop a few weeks ago, and I have been idly reading them over the break. So far the most interesting has been Turnbull’s book on ashigaru in feudal Japan. Very educational, but one section in particular caught my eye; it’s part of a call-up order sent in the mid-16th century:
All men from 15 to 70 years of age are ordered to come; not even a monkey tamer will be let off.
Now, if you also read my gaming blog you may recall that I mentioned a similar quote, this time in an ancient Egyptian context. Horemheb himself said:
As for those monkey-handlers who go around levying taxes in the South and North, extorting grain from the citizenry … My Majesty orders these to be suppressed entirely, to prevent them wronging persons by such fraud.
The author of the book I found it in commented:
The term ‘monkey-handler’ is not to be taken literally, but is probably the late Eighteenth-Dynasty equivalent of ‘shyster’. It goes without saying that the real handlers of monkeys can have done nothing to merit such an unjust reputation.
The Gonzo History Project 