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Taboo Yesterday Vs Taboo Tomorrow
Jan. 2nd, 2022 10:14 amDay 4 of heavy ground mists and an immensely dreary sky. I feel wrapped in grey gauze!
Productive day yesterday. What you do on New Year’s Day, you do throughout the year, right?
I wrote, and I read.
###
I’m realizing Chapter 6 is gonna have to be rewritten entirely. You don’t need the bridge stuff—and then they opened up a speakeasy on Perry Street, and then they had an absinthe orgy at the Hotel Bossert, and then they…—if you divide the book into Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 etcetera.
Each Part can open cleanly!
Part 2 is clearly about June’s infatuation with the character Miller named “Jean Kronski.”
There’s a lot of controversy over who Jean Kronski was in real life. I’m going with the Marion Fish McCarthy theory.
Chapter 6 has to open with a description of the puppet. And also, with June’s mounting sense of Destiny—drumroll that opening D sound. ‘Cause that’s an indication to any smart reader that June is mad as a hatter, and I much prefer to assume prospective readers are smart and do not need exposition dumped over their heads like a bucket of ice water.
I wrote this sentence: Across the inexplicability of space, amidst the impossibility of time, a thousand coincidences had somehow conspired to turn into circumstance.
And then thought, UGH. No! Just no!
And realized it was time to read.
###
Read Alison Weir’s Katharine Parr: The Sixth Wife.
Alison Weir is a self-taught historian who writes fictionalized biographies of various Tudor ladies. Her chief rival is the immensely prolific Philippa Gregory who often writes about the same women but more from a romance novelist’s point of view. I don’t like romance novels, so I prefer Weir. Simple, sturdy prose—I was able to breeze through a 500-page novel in the course of one late afternoon and evening.
I like historical fiction and have done so ever since I first read Anya Seton’s Katherine around the age of 10 or so.
(Of course, most classic literature now functions as “historical novels,” doesn’t it?)
Katharine Parr is more interesting than she’s generally credited as being—mostly on account of her experiences during the Lincolnshire Rising and the role she played, Ghislaine Maxwell to Thomas Seymour’s Jeffrey Epstein, in the molestation of the adolescent who later became the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I.
But the most interesting character in the novel is her sister-in-law, Anne Bourchier, who actually ran off with her lover, the prior of St. James’s Church in Tanbridge, in 1541.
Wild stuff for the mid-16th century!
There is simply no 21st century taboo that comes anywhere close to this in terms of cultural revulsion. I mean, you could sodomize your four-year-old sister tomorrow and then serve her up with some fava beans and a nice Chianti, and you’d still be lightyears away.
A reminder, if you needed one, that taboos are never moral absolutes, merely lagging indicators of social norms that may or may not be functionally useful still.
Productive day yesterday. What you do on New Year’s Day, you do throughout the year, right?
I wrote, and I read.
###
I’m realizing Chapter 6 is gonna have to be rewritten entirely. You don’t need the bridge stuff—and then they opened up a speakeasy on Perry Street, and then they had an absinthe orgy at the Hotel Bossert, and then they…—if you divide the book into Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 etcetera.
Each Part can open cleanly!
Part 2 is clearly about June’s infatuation with the character Miller named “Jean Kronski.”
There’s a lot of controversy over who Jean Kronski was in real life. I’m going with the Marion Fish McCarthy theory.
Chapter 6 has to open with a description of the puppet. And also, with June’s mounting sense of Destiny—drumroll that opening D sound. ‘Cause that’s an indication to any smart reader that June is mad as a hatter, and I much prefer to assume prospective readers are smart and do not need exposition dumped over their heads like a bucket of ice water.
I wrote this sentence: Across the inexplicability of space, amidst the impossibility of time, a thousand coincidences had somehow conspired to turn into circumstance.
And then thought, UGH. No! Just no!
And realized it was time to read.
###
Read Alison Weir’s Katharine Parr: The Sixth Wife.
Alison Weir is a self-taught historian who writes fictionalized biographies of various Tudor ladies. Her chief rival is the immensely prolific Philippa Gregory who often writes about the same women but more from a romance novelist’s point of view. I don’t like romance novels, so I prefer Weir. Simple, sturdy prose—I was able to breeze through a 500-page novel in the course of one late afternoon and evening.
I like historical fiction and have done so ever since I first read Anya Seton’s Katherine around the age of 10 or so.
(Of course, most classic literature now functions as “historical novels,” doesn’t it?)
Katharine Parr is more interesting than she’s generally credited as being—mostly on account of her experiences during the Lincolnshire Rising and the role she played, Ghislaine Maxwell to Thomas Seymour’s Jeffrey Epstein, in the molestation of the adolescent who later became the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I.
But the most interesting character in the novel is her sister-in-law, Anne Bourchier, who actually ran off with her lover, the prior of St. James’s Church in Tanbridge, in 1541.
Wild stuff for the mid-16th century!
There is simply no 21st century taboo that comes anywhere close to this in terms of cultural revulsion. I mean, you could sodomize your four-year-old sister tomorrow and then serve her up with some fava beans and a nice Chianti, and you’d still be lightyears away.
A reminder, if you needed one, that taboos are never moral absolutes, merely lagging indicators of social norms that may or may not be functionally useful still.
