This and that

[selenak]

There are still some free slots in my January meme, so if you want me to ramble on about the topic of your choice, ask me there.

I watched Glass Onion on Netflix which is indeed that rarity, a sequel of equal quality. All the actors are clearly having a blast, and yet it doesn't feel self indulgent, not least because in addition to Rian Johnson's (gleeful) anger at the super rich, there is, as in Knives Out, also a character to root for. (In addition to Blanc, that is, and in a way emotionally affecting that Blanc, in the detective role, can't be.) Here is an interesting interview with Johnson about this - spoilerly for Knives Out, but not Glass Onion -, though my favourite passage is this (which refers to a bit of dialogue that comes after Birdie, the Kate Hudson character, has prided herself on being a telling-it-like-it-is type:

Sims: The best line in the movie is Benoit saying to Kate Hudson’s character [a fashion designer named Birdie], “It’s a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth,” and her replying, “Are you calling me dangerous?” You’re illustrating the voice that certain people present to society.

Johnson: The whole movie, for me, is a bit of a primal scream against the carnival-like idiocy of the past six years.

I hear you, Rian.

I also read The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope which was one of cahn's Christmas presents, and found it charming and engaging. The fairies manage to be genuinely other, which is always a plus in my book, and Kate was an excellent heroine. The relationship between her and her main antagonist eventually develops in the best kind of worthy opponent respect against the odds. If anything feels dated, it's the framing of late in Mary Tudor's reign, where (off page) Mary is just a meanie; one has the impression less for her religious policies and more because she supposedly makes sister Elizabeth live at Hatfield because it's the most unpleasant and coldest of Royal palaces. (Never mind the fact Elizabeth as a baby and toddler was put there already by her parents when her mother was still alive and Queen and that Mary was part of her household then.) After more recent takes on Mary I. which were far more interesting and more dimensional - for example, The Tudors had its myriad of faults, but its take on young Mary was one of its undisputed highlights, and Becoming Elizabeth has a very compelling, smart and heroic Mary while also showing the seeds of what's to come - it feels weird to go back to Cinderella!Elizabeth and Evil Stepsister!Mary. But this really is just early in the book to get the plot going, as our heroine Kate is banished by (mean) Mary to the titular location, and so it doesn't impact on the overall quality of the novel. (One last Tudor nitpick: when Kate finds out about pagan human sacrifice by burning, she reacts as one would, but I kept waiting for someone to bring up that if this is late in Mary I's reign, and Kate was a member of Elizabeth's household (thus presumably Protestant), Kate actually should firstly be aware of some present day Christian-on-Christian burnings, and secondly, if she remembers her childhood, be aware that there were also burnings ordered by Protestant Edward and Doing-His-Own-Thing Henry VIIII. (Meaning: executing another human being by fire should not be news to anyone living in the reign of a Tudor. Doesn't mean Kate can't be shocked. But not in the 20th century kind of way.)

Lastly, I'm continuing wiht the History of Byzantium podcast and am now around ca. 925 AD. Talk about violent regime changes. (Not just on the Byzantine side. The Abbasid Kaliphate is falling apart simultanously.) Iconoclasm is over and done with, and now I'm curious what the next big theological dispute will be - the great schism, I suppose?

Comments

[nostalgia]

I got to the word "burning" and thought "oh like Bloody Mary?" and then oh they don't mention that?

[selenak]

Not that I recall. (Though maybe I overlooked a reference.) Like I said, when the heroine hears about wicker man like human sacrifices and is understandably shocked, my mind still went…. „yeah, but Archbishop Cramner and all those other people recently?“

Maybe I‘m just too influenced by a novel in which the Aztec narrator after a Spaniard goes „human sacrifices WTF?“ at him says, what‘s this I heard about burning heretics?

(I mean, obviously both are wrong, and I don‘t bedgrudge Kate being shocked at the thought of burning people. But if you do set your novel in that era…)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, without having read the book in question, for me it would come down to: is she horrified by the thought of a person being burned alive, or at the thought of pagan sacrifices? Because the ability of the human mind to compartmentalize is really quite extraordinary; see also 19th/early 20th century British ministers writing indignantly about Fritz's invasions. :P

The bit where Macaulay, who used to be stationed in India, blames Fritz for the fact that "black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the great lakes of North America," because British colonialism is just that totally natural to him, never ceases to amaze.

[cahn]

So -- I went back to find the passage in question.

"Did they say how they were going to [pay the teind/sacrifice you] -- on All Hallows' Eve?"

[...]

"When I was a boy at home in Norfolk," said Christopher, "we young folk always lit a great fire in the fields on All Hallows' Eve, and then threw in a figure of a man made of the last harvest's straw... We called it 'burning the payer.' None of us thought that in the old days the man might not have been made out of straw."

There was another long pause, and then Kate said, with her voice sticking in her throat: "Not -- not -- made out of --"

"As for the burning: well, it seems to have been the customary manner of offering a sacrifice to the gods among the heathen British that the Romans found here when they first came to England. I remember reading about it in school. It's in Caesar somewhere."

"But that --" said Kate numbly, "that was almost sixteen hundred years ago."

So, well, both. The focus is on the pagan sacrifice of it all. And what Kate herself is principally shocked by is that this will be the method for disposing of Christopher, this person that she knows (and may be in the process of falling in love with), and she might well have reacted that way to any death method Christopher had told her about. But then of course you could reasonably think that Christopher's response might be along the lines of "well, the burning part of it does happen quite a bit now as well as sixteen hundred years ago..." (although at this point he too is probably a bit fixated on "welp, this is the thing that's going to happen to me!") And certainly there is an undercurrent here of burning alive being a terrible thing that doesn't happen every day!

On the other hand I'm going to give this a big out because I believe this was published as a kid's book, and I know it was published in 1974. (It won the Newbery Honor, which, selenak, is part of the big children's award in the US for the best children's book of the year -- it's the second place to the Newbery Award, which you may have heard of?) I can see why, given that, even if it occurred to Pope that there were a lot of other people getting burned, she might well have figured that she didn't really want to get into that.

(Same for the pregnancy aspect of Tam Lin -- to be fair, the whole book is about how the origins of stories and ballads can be very different from what the stories and ballads say, but I'm used to the pregnancy being kind of a big deal in most versions and retellings! But that would not have worked so well for a kid's book published in 1974...)

[selenak]

On the other hand I'm going to give this a big out because I believe this was published as a kid's book

Point taken; there's only so much exposition you can put in a book for children, especially since the explanation for the current burnings would have demanded some more backstory about the Reformation in general and Henry VIII's divorce shenanigans etc.; given the focus of the novel was completely elsewhere, I suspect any editor would have said, yeah, no, skip it.

[nostalgia]

Cranmer should have been allowed a wicker man too :(