get busy living or get busy dying

Things I have learned about history from watching the trailer for The Borgias, which is embedded ( here: )

- Rodrigo Borgia was the first pope to buy a papal election.

- He was also the first cleric/cardinal/pope to have illegitimate children.

- He was also the first pope to murder people who pissed him off.

- And he was the first pope to engage in blatant nepotism.

- There were confessional boxes in the fifteenth century.

- There was an Inquisition in fifteenth-century Italy.

- St. Peter's Basilica existed in its present form in the fifteenth century.

- INCEST INCEST INCEST

Did I miss anything?

D:

ETA: I DID FORGET SOMETHING:

- Hatred of the Borgias was in no way motivated by xenophobia! This shit actually happened! They are just telling you the truth.

- This entire show is in no way the product of modern anti-Catholic sentiment!

I'm just in the WORST mood today, holy god.

I'm going to see Inception again tomorrow, and then I will have some thoughts to post. I have this theory about what's going on? and it's currently three single-spaced pages long, but I need to do some fact-checking and shit before I post, so.

Also, I need new icons. bleh.

Day 03 - The best book you've read in the last 12 months

I was going to do one of each fiction and nonfiction, but I just checked my goodreads and saw that I've only read three novels in the last twelve months (out of... one hundred and sixteen (116!!) books total) so I'm not sure there's any point in it. One of them was Sherlock Holmes; another was Six Suspects by Vikas Swarup, which was not as good as Q&A; the last was Not Wanted On the Voyage by Timothy Findley, which remains one of my favourite novels ever, but which resonated somewhat less than it did the first time I read it in 2003.

So, nonfiction it is. I have somewhat different criteria for what makes an awesome work of nonfiction, so instead of getting into that, I'm just going to tell you some of the coolest books I've read in the last twelve months, if not the best:

- The Consumption of Justice by Daniel Lord Smail, which is about how market forces drove the development of the justice system in medieval Marseille. It blows up the idea that the history of the justice system is the story of the inexorable march toward the police state, and is freaking awesome.

- Before European Hegemony by Janet Abu-Lughod, which was the first of those global histories that actually dealt with like, history and shit, before Jared Diamond came along and shat all over the field. The book that got me interested in world history, with global interconnections throughout history, and the role of the environment on demography, economy, society, and politics.

( The other days. )

My supervisor just approved my dissertation proposal! All I need to do now is run it by my to-be-assembled committee, and then I will be ready to start researching. Holy fuck you guys. It's like entering an entirely new phase of my LIFE -- I'm not really a student anymore, but like an actual historian or something? Crazy.

Anyway! I am gearing up to see Robin Hood this weekend, and I'm pretty sure you can't spoil a movie you haven't actually seen, right? So:

- This movie is totally Kingdom of Heaven + The Return of Martin Guerre + something vaguely remembered about the early thirteenth century as translated through the Disney version with the foxes, isn't it?

- FUCK RICHARD LIONHEART, OH MY GOD. I think this every time I hear/read/see mention of Robin Hood anyway, but YES, let us glorify the king for his involvement in that master stroke of medieval warfare and for bankrupting England. No seriously; it's cool. It's not like there were any long-term ramifications or a horrific loss of life and wholesale destruction of cultures or anything.

- Magna Carta = such a populist document, no? Oh wait -- NO.

And -- okay. I really like crappy historical film and television, not because its actually tends to bear any strict resemblance to the period or events it purports to depict, but because it often conveys the feeling of an age that is now lost. I really like Kingdom of Heaven but because it communicates the feeling of "what the hell are we actually DOING here?" that so many first-wave Crusaders likely felt by the time they actually arrived in the Levant. And I like Restoration because it engages with a lot of themes that we typically associate with (early) modernity: the emergence of the individual, scientific progress, pseudo-democratic representation. I even like shit like The Tudors, which at least conveys the seriously ad hoc nature of early modern politics.

By stripping the light-hearted fun out of something like Robin Hood, you've pretty much destroyed the possibility of evoking a period-appropriate feeling. This is not to say that the middle ages were always light-hearted and fun -- clearly they were not -- but the reason that this myth has stuck with us in the guise that it has is that it propagates and perpetuates attitudes toward both peasant and overlord that appeals to detractors of both. But if you don't have the stereotypically sly, trickster Robin Hood, you lose the opportunity to mediate between the two.

The purpose of the myth, historically, has been to say: look, these peasants may look stupid, and this government may look evil, and it may seem impossible to reconcile the interests of the two in a society that operates in a manner that is respectful to both without destroying the underlying structures, customs, and traditions -- but here's our way out. Here's someone who can be loved by the peasantry and hated by the nobility, but whose tactics are simply so deviously ingenious that you're torn between waiting to see what he'll do next and waiting for the law to catch up with him. The myth is deliberately meant to communicate those sociopolitical tensions without deviating significantly from popular medieval tropes. Take out the fun, the merrymaking, the mischievous thievery, and you've kind of missed the point.

That said, I am actually pretty excited to see this movie and to (maybe) be proved wrong.

Today I read 750 pages, and made the disturbing discovery that Clement VII was totally hot before the Sack of Rome. (Compare the 1531 portrait at the top with the 1526 one [Rome was sacked in 1527] at the bottom.) My embarrassment is furthered by the fact that I burst into tears the other day when I read that he died in 1534, which is a fact I already knew and have never before cared about. You guys, I am totally over-invested in A DEAD POPE. I probably should have seen this coming when I named my hamster after him.

Here is another classic post about stupid shit:

- I chopped off about three inches of my hair. I think it looks cute. My mom claims it's very "70s rocker chick". I can't tell if she's making fun of me or not. Probably yes.

- So many stupid papers to grade, holy shit.

- Dear Stephen Haliczer: what the hell? A Vatican board game?

- The other day I was at PIMS (ie. where the medievalists hang out and where us early modernists periodically end up at great personal inconvenience), which is the home of the World's Slowest Photocopier. It seriously takes about a minute to photocopy a single page. But this story is not about that. I mean, it's still about the World's Slowest Photocopier, but the point of it is: WSP broke my student/library/photocopy card (t-card). I spent five minutes photocopying seven pages, and when I was done my card was miraculously "flagged", and no longer works in any machine on campus. When I pointed this out to a librarian, he said, oh, just go to Robarts and have them reset it at the t-card office. I did so. Naturally, it being Saturday, said office was closed. I asked someone, now what? They told me to come back when the office was open. Which I will, and it will be very easy and straightforward I'm sure, but the POINT IS: WSP BROKE MY CARD, thus rendering my two-hour round trip to campus on a SATURDAY almost completely pointless.

The moral of the story here is that medievalists suck. Nope, don't even try to tell me otherwise.

- Speaking of medievalists, my best buddy dude!M got into medievalist school for the fall. Hooray! To celebrate, we had beer for lunch and I was late to class. And when I say "was late to class", I mean the class that I ostensibly teach, and that I went to work drunk. The only saving grace was that I didn't actually have to teach anything.

- And speaking of the class that I teach, I spent an inordinate amount of time today trying to come up with trivia questions for their review session. So far I have things like "which 18th century liberal thinker was reportedly kidnapped by gypsies as a child?" and "which 19th century British prime minister moonlighted as a hack novelist in his spare time?" and "which classic Renaissance man wrote a guidebook on managing the family despite having been universally despised by his own?" Srsly, history is like this epic fandom where everything is hilarious.

- Apparently my Sure Thing is no longer my Sure Thing, because it came out that I don't actually want to date him. He has gone cold! And has stopped speaking to me! But sadly for him, reverse psychology doesn't work on me either. I still kind of feel like a jerk, though.

- I seriously have the most boring livejournal ever. All I talk about is history, and also my hair. Case in point: this entry.

The phantom time hypothesis:

This ... gives reason to assume that a phantom period of approximately 300 years has been inserted between 600 AD to 900 AD, either by accident, by misinterpretation of documents or by deliberate falsification. This period and all events that are supposed to have happened therein never existed.

-- Franz-Ulrich Niemitz, "Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?", 1.

I laughed until I cried, and then I really cried when someone pointed out that eliminating 300 years of history makes me a medievalist. omgno.

Le Dormeur du val

C'est un trou de verdure où chante une rivière
Accrochant follement aux herbes des haillons
D'argent; où le soleil de la montagne fière,
Luit; C'est un petit val qui mousse de rayons.
Un soldat jeune bouche ouverte, tête nue,
Et la nuque baignant dans le frais cresson bleu,
Dort; il est étendu dans l'herbe, sous la nue,
Pale dans son lit vert où la lumière pleut.

Les pieds dans les glaïeuls, il dort. Souriant comme
Sourirait un enfant malade, il fait un somme:
Nature, berce-le chaudement: il a froid.

Les parfums ne font plus frissonner sa narine;
Il dort dans le soleil, la main sur sa poitrine
Tranquille. Il a deux trous rouges au coté droit.

-- Arthur Rimbaud

When I was at the British Library this afternoon, I found a copy of the last will and testament of Robert Blackader, Archbishop of Glasgow, made in Venice in 1508.* Archbishop Blackader! That Rowan Atkinson knew what he was about, didn't he? Jeeeenius.

Also, today's hot plate at the Death Star canteen (aka the BL restaurant) included a side of roasted pumpkin slices. I mean, I know pumpkin's not indigenous to this country? But seriously. ROASTED PUMPKIN. I don't even know anymore.

*

When I got home, I started to clean my room, and then discovered that the vacuum is missing. I went downstairs to report it missing/stolen (probably because the cleaning contractors are assholes who constantly leave our front door propped wide open after they're done) and the security guard on duty blathered at me for a good twenty minutes. Normally I don't mind talking to the security staff, because they're nice guys, and if they know me they're less likely to hassle me for my illegal hamster, and also more likely to try to convince the residence staff not to take money out of my deposit for our stolen vacuum -- but he was asking me why I don't have a boyfriend, and doesn't my mom bug me about getting one, and why not, and is it just that I don't find boys that fun compared to my work (lol)? And then he asked me when I'm free to "lecture him in history" (accompanied by a wink), and then it was just creepy. I mean, he's old enough to be my father. Ew.

*

And as a final, totally unrelated thing: I'm considering giving myself a WIP amnesty day and posting that O11 Belize fic, and the one where Sirius is Remus's boggart, and the one where Remus runs away from home, and various other ficlets in various other fandoms that never got off the ground and never, ever will. y/n?


* _{Full citation: Rosamond J. Mitchell, "Archbishop Blackader in Venice", Bollettino dell'Istituto di Storia della Società e dello Stato Veneziano, pp. 169-178. The appendix contains the will, in Latin. lolllllz.)}

Turning off the internet lasted about 45 minutes. sigh.

I am now procrastinating by playing a little game that I call over-simplifying historical causal factors, wherein someone asks a very open-ended question about history (eg. as above, "why did the crusading spirit die out by 1700?") and I (and everyone else in historystudents) provide(s) helpful one-liners that don't actually explain anything, yet remain factually correct. It is way, way, way more fun than writing a 4000-word bibliographical review of the literature on the Counter-Reformation, heresy in Counter-Reformation Italy, and Nicodemism among Counter-Reformation Italian heretics, which is of course what I'm supposed to be doing.

Anyway anyway. I have a hot not-date with Boston dude on Friday, which I suspect will be worth it for the simple fact that I will get to hear a tolerable American accent on a dude that isn't HR. (Note that neither of them actually has a Boston accent. That would not qualify as tolerable.) Ugh, homesick.

( some more nonsense about money. )

Now I will actually do some work. NO REALLY.

My hamster hates me. I tried to coax him out of his little hamster house, and instead of coming out he bit me hard enough to draw blood. I should have named him after Julius II, the violent pope. (Note: link goes to Erasmus-as-sock-puppet's Julius Excluded From Heaven, which is hilarious even if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

I have a massive headache after a useless, useless day in which I accomplished nothing, as I don't think I retained a single word that I read. Fortunately, one of my flatmates has received a shipment of American Oreos (apparently the Oreos you get here are wrong. I didn't even know you could get Oreos in this country.) so I will stuff some of those down my gullet, go to bed, and in the morning I will be smart again. At least, that is my hope.