7. April Digest/Digress
transgressive mothers, writing aversions, wanton monarchs, audio-assisted reading
“And no one needed to write down
Or restate, or make record of, or ever would,
And never will,
The plainspoken music of recognition”
- Eavan Boland
Welcome back to Think Club: the monthly newsletter for thinkers and over-thinkers everywhere! I’m still in London, still speaking in all caps on Instagram, still eating a lot of dark chocolate (though I’ve titrated my tastebuds up to tolerate the 100% blocks now), still living in a shared room in a shared flat in a shared building, still wanting a meaningful vocation for everyone that doesn’t disappear when consumerism does, still keen on a UBI whatever the vocation, still angry about NHS heroism discourse that obscures government failure, and still going for paranoid pedestrian-dodging walks and sneaking some time in the local park when the big brother runners aren’t watching (“the park’s for exercising”, shouted one at me the other day as I sat for a moment on the grass. I still, as an adult, get that body-betrayal thing where I want to cry whenever someone tells me off, so I did cry a little bit at the way that grass has become a contraband substance, only permitted for the under-foot virtue of wannabe athletes. What I wouldn’t give for a garden or a terrace or a balcony or a berm or a timed ticket to the park for my five minutes of skin to grass communion). Whenever I read about the UK or the monarchy or empire my spatial brain places it somewhere far away, up there, only to remember with a jolt that I am here. But at least I am here writing to you!
This April retrospective is frustrating because all I long to do is communicate in an instantly intelligible web of connected points rather than a sequential letter (paragraph by paragraph, plod by plod, bird by bird). Writing seems like a terribly inefficient technology. I’m not talking about efficiency in the capital maximal sense, just the sense of thoughts moving on a different highway to words. I don’t think in words - do you? I want a more diagrammatic way to say the things that come to mind when I think about the texts that I have read this month: a collage, a map, Boland’s plainspoken music of recognition, a crooked, bendy, woven thing of strings that make constantly shifting constellations, never resting in one shape. But one shape is what you will read, because that is how a letter works. I think that’s the problem with most writing products for me at the moment: they are too committed to their shape; too quick to seal off all the manifold possibilities of what could be. Most of the novels that I’ve picked up feel far too confident for this moment: I can’t help but laugh or balk at the merry world-building that went on prior to the pandemic. And not only the world-building but the pat lyricism and breathy curlicues of The Novel. But I’m too fickle because the other options aren’t working for me, either: all ‘experimental’ writing feels too preening at the moment. The way the experiment can’t help but foreground the presence of the experimenter says LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT MY DARING, LOOK AT MY ATTEMPTS TO GRAPPLE WITH THE MANIFOLD. I’m not exaggerating when I say that trying to read has made me feel sick at points this past month. A dietary intolerance to writing is a strange but perhaps inevitable predicament for someone trained in literary scholarship. But I know best not to name and shame the objects of my pandemic reading dis-ease right now, for this might be the rare case that it’s not you, it’s me.
TV has worked, at times. I’m making my way through Ozark Season Three, extremely slowly. I usually relish the sticky stress of it but this month it has been too much to let the auto-queued next episode play on. The last episode I watched entered my dreams and there I was, lucid, in a cartel dungeon, asking myself what I really want. I am loving watching the way that Wendy is coming into her hubristic own, shucking off the Peter Pan Wendy connotations of being almost completely defined by motherly devotion. Ozark’s Wendy is still living with the half-life sputters of that former life - moments of guilt and sorrow when she’s not composing her face for the ruthless run-in of the day. But I love the transgressive rush of witnessing a mother that oversteps the remit to do just enough to keep everything just right. She wants more. When Ozark became too much I decided to finish off The Good Place, knowing there were a few episodes leftover from when my partner Ryan moved to London and I remained in Auckland. When we were reunited we never resumed - until now. But if heaven is a place bound by earth-bound philosophy then please don’t kill me now. And if heaven is a place saved by landlord actors then please also don’t kill me now. One thing that did console me about the final episodes of this series was seeing that even a version of paradise might become intolerable if you stay there long enough. (Maybe its okay to be finding this blessed roof over my head a little stultifying.)
I finally broke the streak of unconsoling and unconscionable reading by re-reading Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies. I was relieved to finally find an absence of the jarring writerliness of the other books I’d tried. Any writerly insertions provoked more mirth than bile - pleasing jolts from the aphoristic turns. Set over the span of the nine months preceding the schemed execution of Anne Boleyn, the book reads like a queasy prequel to a great man’s undoing. And of course that’s exactly what it is. Thomas Cromwell reflects on a moment with his late wife:
Once he had watched Liz making a silk braid. One end was pinned to the wall and on each finger of her raised hands she was spinning loops of thread, her fingers flying so fast he couldn’t see how it worked. ‘Slow down,’ he said, ‘so I can see how you do it,’ but she’d laughed and said, ‘I can’t slow down, if I stopped to think how I was doing it I couldn’t do it at all.’
And in this scene I saw it all - the can’t-stoppableness of proximity to power. Best to keep spinning, spinning the court’s invisible threads of allegiances, bargains, loyalties than to slow down and confront the unsustainable knife edge that is serving a wanton monarch. Reading this series has been an uncanny glimpse into the precursors to all that I have worked to understand and critique in settler-colonialism. It was in the 1540s that Henry VIII annexed French lands to the English crown and imposed a colonial settlement on them. The ‘conquered’ lands of Boulogne were surveyed and leased out to English settlers, while the English common law and the reformed church was forced on the region. It ‘only’ lasted six years, but not long after the colonisation of Boulogne came land confiscations and English colonies in Ireland. A blueprint of a reign; a colonising programme set in motion.
I’ll admit that reading this book was only made possible by simultaneously borrowing the e-audiobook and the text ebook from the library. I did what I used to have my restless Year 9 English class do: I read along in my own copy as the voice read the book to me, until I managed to wean myself off the ventilator of the voice and carry on by myself. I relinquished the audiobook for the next person in the queue and off I went with the ebook alone, proudly unassisted. I’m now reading The Mirror and the Light but you’ll forgive me for not having finished it in time to feature this month. I’m missing the heavy door-stopper effect with the ebook version, but I’m loving it so far. An early scene sees a course of eels served for a crucial meeting between Cromwell and Ambassador Chapuys. Only the viability of the reformed church hangs in the balance. Behind the scenes, Cromwell has had a hand in the preparation of the meal: a chance for him to take the gossipy temperature of the people of London via his cook Thurston, and a return to his origins, too. “When he was a cook he kept his eels in their watery world will the pans were hot. Still, it’s not worthwhile to argue”. Ever the diplomat, is our Cromwell.
Links, in brief:
“This constructed separation of humanity and nature and the systematic violation of Indigenous rights that accompanied it continued to serve as the foundation of American environmental conservation” - Roshan Krishnan, “White Environmentalism and the Corporate University”
“Vote for me or the other lot get in” is routine democratic politics. “Do this or else” is raw democratic politics. At that point it doesn’t look so different from politics of any other kind".” - David Runciman, in The Guardian (who also recorded a great episode of Talking Politics with Helen Thompson “In Praise of Hilary Mantel”).
Fran Lebowitz says that “when they compile a list of the heroes of this era, I will not be on it” and that “it is a very startling thing to be my age—I’m sixty-nine—and to have something happen that doesn’t remind you of anything else”. Talk about a monarch of the wanton one-liner, bloody hell.
Yes, another much-read New York-based piece but I have to share restauranteur Gabrielle Hamilton’s essay for her phrases like, “waterboarded by the news” and her failed-state observations of the GoFundMe campaigns raising money to help Covid-affected restaurants feeling “like a popularity contest or a survival-of-the-most-well-connected that I couldn’t bring myself to enter. It would make me feel terrible if Prune was nicely funded while the Sikhs at the Punjabi Grocery and Deli down the street were ignored, and simultaneously crushed if it wasn’t”.
More on the food theme: a new newsletter - Vittles - with an essay from Nina Mingya Powles on Making Doufu Hua: “If I translate “dòufu huā” into English, it loses some of its taste, its shape. The direct translation is “tofu flower” and Beijingers call it dòufunǎo, “tofu brains.” In English you could call it “soft beancurd,” or even “jellied tofu” as my dictionary app suggests. “Tofu pudding” is the one translation that makes sense to me, owing to its custard-like texture.”
I hope that May is a real pudding of a month for you, wherever you are.
Until next time, thinkers!
x H
IG: @hannyplease
Twitter: @hannahleespls
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