May 7 2013

1. Happy birthday, N!

2. Listening to a podcast this morning, I was pondering how much I wish I could meet Cleopatra. It makes me genuinely sad that I will never get a chance to talk to her, to see for myself the wit and intellect that won people and kingdoms.

She’s not the only one. Victoria Woodhull. Mandukhai Khatun. Eleanor of Aquitaine. History is full of brilliant, angry, motivated women, and I won’t ever get to talk to them. It’s a sadness to me.

3. Warehouse 13 is back on the air! And this season is looking a bit darker, which is EXACTLY what I wanted.

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November 15 2012

1. We went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art yesterday to see the special exhibition, China’s Terracotta Warriors. I have all sorts of feelings about this exhibit. There’s all this history, y’all. All this stuff of human hearts and hands and will, lasting evidence of the work and mind of the long-dead. I told my family I was going to sniffle through the whole exhibit, and I did.

The bit that got to me wasn’t the gold buckles, or the jeweled dagger, or the terracotta warriors themselves. No, what got to me was a brass weight. A standardized weight, used throughout Qin to measure things. Standardized weights mean trade. They mean economics. This brass weight was evidence of the long line of trade from the Yellow River to the Rubicon. It took two years for goods to make it that far, sometimes. Ox carts to Tun-Huang, bactrians to Kashgar, donkeys or dromedaries to Samarkand, dromedaries to Palmyra and Tyre, ships to Rome.

Human beings did that. They took the chances, accepted the risks. They did it for money, for power, for glory. They did it for the sight of new things. They did it for freedom and personal autonomy. They did it for all sorts of reasons, for thousands of years. People, walking the leather off their feet as they led their animals thousands of miles.

Team Human, y’all. We’re pretty spectacular, sometimes.

2. Tonight K tries out for the circus summer show. Break a leg, kiddo. I’m wishing you the best.

3. We can keep the front curtains open, now. We couldn’t for years, because Jake would stand on the couch and bark out of it at every passerby. But now there’s no Jake, and we can open the curtains. I miss my hound.

4. My nine-year-old son’s feet are as big as my feet. O_o This bodes … well, it just bodes, let’s leave it at that.

5. All I want to do recently is read fanfic, which I haven’t read in ages. Luckily for me, AO3 just updated with a patch that lets you sort by kudos. So I can look up a fandom or pairing, and then sort so all the best-regarded fic are at the top of the list. Thank goodness.

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History, all the feels

I’ve been listening to BBC Radio 4′s A History of the World in 100 Objects podcast. I’ve already read (and own) the book. Briefly, it’s a chronological history of humans as told through 100 objects from the British Museum. It’s neat.

The episode about the statue of the head of Rameses the Great opened by quoting Shelly’s Ozymandias. “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, Look on my Works ye Mighty, and despair!” Because, of course, Shelly was looking at this statue and thinking of how all empires, however mighty, fall to sand.

Listening to the podcast, I thought, Shelly was wrong. We teach our kids about ancient Egypt. We, meaning, the entire world, not we meaning my household. Kids know what pyramids are, they know what mummies are, we collectively know what hieroglyphics kinda sorta look like even though we can’t read them.

Those immortality-seeking ancient Egyptians, they won. They did it. They are immortal. Rameses the Great lives forever.

This thought is nothing close to original. It’s even trite. That doesn’t … that doesn’t make it less true. We carry the dead with us in every single thing we do. We carry the dead on our roads, in our mobile phones, we carry our dead to other planets. In an earlier episode of the podcast a scholar was discussing the Jomon pots of Japan. Japan gives these pots as diplomatic gifts. Because Japan, as a nation, has decided to remember themselves as a people with a 17,000-year-old pottery tradition. The first humans on the planet to make a clay pot and cook stew. Every time you cook, you carry the dead.

The other day my son said, “We’ve come a long way. And we have so far to go.”

Yes. Yes, we do. I find it incredibly comforting to know we’ve gotten this far.

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Podcast rec: Shakespeare’s Restless World

I’ve now finished listening to the podcast of BBC Radio 4′s Shakespeare’s Restless World. It’s twenty episodes, each 15-20 minutes long, and it’s a sweeping delight.

The gist of the podcast is an exploration of the world surrounding Shakespeare and his audience. Each episode gives the social, political, and emotional context of a specific theme of scene in Shakespeare’s work. Pirates, for instance. What did “pirates” mean to the Groundlings? Or, beheadings — what did audiences think of when they saw heads paraded about onstage? Or, what does “Moor” mean?

I love this. I love the blend of fiction and reality, of history and literature. The production values of the podcast are high (it’s BBC Radio 4, after all) and it’s an easy listen.

If you have any interest in Shakespeare or British history, I highly recommend this.

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Mistakes were made

As I have mentioned before, I’m listening to and thoroughly enjoying The History of Rome podcast. I’m up to Constantine, and Late Antiquity.

I was talking to my son the other evening. He was expressing his desire to be Master of the Universe. I have been listening to the history of men who were, for all practical purposes, Masters of the Universe. And what I’ve learned is that the job, while it had its perks, was really kinda a ball of suck.

Don’t get me wrong; being a master of your universe is likely better than the other options. But it wasn’t, for the Roman emperors, the unfettered ball of joy that my son clearly envisions. No matter how much you got away with during the height of your power — Commodus, I’m looking at you — eventually the bill had to be paid. Likely in poison, garrote, or the blade.

But that’s not always evident from the start.

I didn’t challenge my son’s desire for power, autonomy, and control of his environment. That’s human. Everyone wants to not be at the whimsical mercy of powers beyond their control. And, frankly, childhood can be rather like that. Why is it, after all, that I insist chores be done before playing? It’s evident cruelty and nonsense, apparently. Fantasies of power are part of human nature.

Instead of challenge him, I asked him how he would work out the practical details. How would other people eat, sleep, and be kept safe? How would criminals be punished? Who would own property and profits? What recourse would everyone else have if they disagreed with The Master?

By the end of the discussion M had voluntarily modified his military dictatorial autocracy to a modified autocracy, retaining rule by fiat by with an elected body of representatives to air grievances and make requests. Allegations of crime would be investigated by robots and judgments made by the Supreme Autocrat. Work would be organized somewhat like the Soviet Collectives, with rules enforced by appointed quasi-military commanders acting on data collected by robots.

I was pleased with this discussion. With some questions from me my eight-year-old got as far as the major political mistakes of the sixteenth-through-twentieth centuries. This is excellent. This, this is why we teach history, you understand. We teach history so we stand a snowball’s chance in hell of not making the same damn mistakes over and over again. Part of what made Constantine “The Great” was the fact that he had Diocletian’s administrative successes to build on. Part of what felled the Western Roman Empire was that none of these folks understood how inflation worked. If any of them had figured it out you can bet his successors would have not erred again.

Everybody makes their own mistakes. Nothing we can teach can stop a person from just going right on ahead with a terrible idea. Moreover, you can’t make any new mistakes. Not really.

What we can do is try to learn what sort of mistakes other people have made, and avoid the obvious missteps. We can look at the array of choices available to us and make a sincere and intelligently informed decision as to which sets of predicted consequences we want.

Lie about doing chores? Grounded for a week.
Put a puppet king on the throne of Armenia again? War with Sassanid Persia. Again.
Stomping tantrum when reminded to put away clothes? An extra chore.
Debase the currency? Overthrown by the legions.

If you don’t want war with the Sassanids at this juncture, stay away from Armenia. If you want to play Minecraft later, finish your schoolwork cheerfully. It’s easy to pick the outcome you want when you understand the consequences.

I love history.

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Revolution

I know too much about history.

Most revolutions fail. The history of the world is so littered with uprisings, revolutions, coups, and insurrections that have failed that we keep no record of them all.

My kids are really into the musical Les Miserables right now. I try to explain to them how this wasn’t The French Revolution, this was some precursor in which everyone died and nothing changed. I try to explain this, but I have trouble. I start crying halfway through the explanation. Crying a bit for the dead French peasants, yes. But crying more for the current revolution in Syria. For the Egyptian people and army and their elections. For the Bonus Army marching on Washington D.C. and being massacred by the U.S. Army. For the Long March in China. For the destruction of the Berlin Wall.

Most revolutions fail. Most of the ones that succeed are bloody affairs riddled with crimes of petty venality and crimes of selfless public spirit. Between petty venality and true-believer-passion, I’m not sure which leads to more death. Yet …

Yet people are people, and we keep trying to make things better. We keep trying to better ourselves, or the world, or the lives of our children, or the greater sum of knowledge. And it’s this, more than the squalid death, that makes me sniffle through the fireworks on July Fourth.

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Domestic scene:

Sigrid stands in the hallway outside a closed door. She knocks gently, an expression of concern on her face. J answers. “Yes?”

Sigrid peeks around the door. J is midway through Allison Bechdel’s new memoir, Are You My Mother? She’s got her finger marking her place and is looking up expectantly. Sigrid is frowning, clearly pondering something of great import.

“I just want you to know,” Sigrid tells J, “that I am not barraging you with a constant stream of Mongol Queen Facts.”

End scene.

To wit, I am loving The Secret History of the Mongol Queens. I will share with you, Gentle Reader, one snippet of fact. Alaqai Beki, Genghis Khan’s daughter, was sent at the age of seventeen to marry the leader of the Onggud. The Onggud occupied the borderlands north of Yuan China and south of the Gobi. Genghis Khan needed the Onggud if he was to successfully attack China.

The Great Khan did not send his army. He sent his teenage daughter. She was to conquer northern China for her father. Without an army. By herself.

She did it.

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History, I have all the feelings

I recently read Elizabeth Bear’s Range of Ghosts. It’s a good book, and I enjoyed it. (I was dismayed to hit the end and realize it’s the first part of a series only because the other books aren’t published yet! I will be quite pleased when they are, and I can read them.)

The novel of course made me think of Jack Weatherford’s non-fiction Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. This is an excellent biography of Temujin who became Genghis Khan, and the effect his empire had on the planet. (TL;DR — A lot. A lot of effect.)

I had not yet read The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, also by Weatherford. I started it this weekend and fell back in love with this story. With Temujin, his family, the land and the story of his empire. Moreover, Weatherford made me cry in the introduction.

The premise of The Secret History is that Genghis Khan’s daughters were excised from history. Literally — the passage from the Secret History of the Mongols, Genghis Khan’s court record, that described what kingdoms his daughters would receive was cut out of the paper. Sometime in the hundred years after the legacy was recorded, someone cut it away. We were to be denied knowledge of the reigning Mongol queens because the empires that followed did not want queens in their history.

Recently a trove of lost fairy tales was discovered in Germany. These were stories not collected by the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Anderson, narratives not deemed appropriate or worthy of future generations. This would be merely a curiosity save that the tales lost appear to be the ones with active, heroic girls. With passive, quiet boys. The stories of mothers who lived and fathers who were not blind to evil. The stories recently rediscovered hold the genderqueer, the non-conformative, the challenging, the transgressive.

Considering how much of Western culture has fairy tales in its DNA, this loss is not a footnote, it’s a tragedy. Think how possibly different our mythos might be today if those stories had been included in our canon. So much, so very very much (Campbell, Bettelheim, I’m looking at you) has been made of the inevitability of the Hero’s Journey. It’s not inevitable. It never was. It was created, deliberately, by people with a point to make.

I wouldn’t object to that point if it was one view among many. But I can’t help but think that the evisceration of the fairy tale canon hundreds of years ago has led, somehow, to the gender divisions in my household Legos. The fairy tales that survived the cut created a narrative as pervasive as Virginia Creeper. Those tendrils get everywhere.

But the fairy tales once lost have come back to light.

Genghis Khan’s sons were incapable of maintaining his kingdom. Upon his death the Mongol empire fell apart. But it didn’t fall apart as fast as it ought to have, given their errors and general failure. This is because half the empire was in the hands of The Great Khan’s daughters. Under siege from their siblings and outsiders, eventually their kingdoms also fell. But they existed, despite five hundred years of historical erasure.

Weatherford says it thus:

“Words and documents can dimly reflect the truth, like shadows by a night fire or the outline of a mountain through the mist, but alone they are too small and primitive to contain all of it. While worlds may be altered or censored, the truth endures, even when not properly recorded. Truth can be forgotten, misplaced, or lost, but never annihilated. The human hand might erase the words, mutilate the manuscript, or chisel off a name, but that only alters memory. Such vandalism tampers with the evidence without altering the facts. Cutting part of a document still leaves an outline of what was remover, a silhouette of the missing piece.

” … We rarely find what we do not seek. Once we look for information on these great queens, we realize that much of the history was not hidden at all; it was merely ignored.”

In her book How To Suppress Women’s Writing Joanna Russ mentions that a key tactic is to say that the work in question was not really written by a woman, but by her husband or brother or father or son. This erases the woman from the work. History has done that, does that still, with woman in total — not merely erasing their writing, but erasing the existence of women at all. When I find works that break into that void, that historical conspiracy of silence and erasure and looking the other way, I celebrate. I love reading the secret history — history that always was there, as Weatherford reminds us, even though we may not know it.

But, oh, how different our view of the world might be. How different our political discourse, our religious debate, our cultural arguments might be if we held those hidden histories in our minds. How different it might be if we had a press that compared Sarah Palin to Borte Khatun instead of soccer moms or bears.

I want the women of history to be part of my current mythos. I want the women of past fiction to be part of my current mythos. I want women to be part of my current mythos. And I want those women to occupy space in your head the way they do in mine.

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Cue the clowns

1. It’s Spring Show week for us at Circus Juventas. I am off of work until Monday in order to help get this done.

2. My brother and his family are visiting! We’ll get to see them Thursday through Saturday, and I look forward to it.

3. Henry VI’s Regency Council was awfully shortsighted. I mean, when they took the Mortimer and March lands away from Richard, what did they think was going to happen? Did they think he was going to quietly accept it? Okay, they might have — after all, the Beauforts did.

4. I sat down with M last night to watch some classic James Bond. Halfway through the movie he said he wanted to go read instead. I am so proud, y’all.

5. J took our daughter to her dress rehearsal last night. For the unicycle act, K walks out onto the floor alone. She mounts the unicycle unaided, throws her arms into the air, and signals the rest of the act to come riding out. J told me that K looks very, very small out there by herself. I have to remember, she’s only eight. A fairly accomplished eight, but eight nonetheless.

6. The Multiple Trapeze rig is apparently much much higher for the show than it is in practice. One of the girls started crying, she was so scared. K says it’s really, really high. Really high. Really scary-high.

Red wine and British monarchs

Having my friend Nancy Clue over for English monarch drinking games is expensive. Not because she drinks that much, or because I do — in fact, she brought the wine! — but because I end up going to Amazon and ordering more freaking books.

My to-be-read stack IS diminishing, I SWEAR it is. But it bloody well WON’T if I keep getting more BOOKS.

On the other hand, I now comprehend why NC can’t watch The Tudors. If you conflate Henry VIII’s two sisters, Mary and Margaret, into one sister, you remove either James VI’s claim to the throne or Jane Grey’s claim. This buggers up all subsequent English history.

There are a lot of various claims floating around history about who or what “created the modern world.” The thing is, I think most of them are correct. There are so many things, so many things that could have gone differently and we wouldn’t be where we are today. Elizabeth I is one of those things. The number of opportunities she had to NOT get to the throne are legion. And without her England would not have become a navel power. Without her, likely no Shakespeare. Without her, likely no British colonization of southern North America. (Maybe the dissidents and religion reformer would still have come, but would we have even HAD them, without her? Would Mary have wiped out the Anglican church? Would the Puritan church have begun?)

The early stories of history I learned made this all sound so clean, so inevitable. It made the events of history sound almost planned. But it’s not, and I love that so damn much. History is made by people, messy people with gout and dysentery, with grudges and feuds, people who remember insults at dances when they were children and later start wars. Mary had so many opportunities to kill her half-sister, Elizabeth. But she didn’t, partly because they had loved each other when they were younger.

I love this about history because it means that we, making history, don’t have to be exceptional. Our normal muddling along is the fundamental building block of all recorded history. So go ye forth and muddle; you have the company of queens.