Summer reading....
Entertainment & News at il Poggiolo is mostly by the written word. No TV sets. Otherwise, plenty of laptops. They used to serve as home ports for various DVD players. The first was given to me by some Codiponte friends to help me survive convalescence after my first hip op seven long years ago. It was great. Shitty sound. But, I could slip in any US, European or, UK DVD, and the gadget would let it roll on unimpeded to the closing credits, and not bark at me like the Apple contraption purchased with a MacBook a few months later. When I could walk. Three chances to bat between US and European, etc. DVD’s yet, after the third time, you’re stuck with whatever was your last choice. Usually the one you do not want the fourth time. Feel this is a decidedly forma antipatica bordering on IT terrorism by Apple…. damn them. And what with a company valuation of $2.3 trillion, Apple should pay us to use their overpriced & recalcitrant products. Professed improvements to the company product’s planned obsolescence does leave much to be desired, to explain the later complaint. All this CD-player business was way before steaming fell into vogue in Italy and, when it did hit, it immediately required a hasty increase in wi-fi power. So be it. I cannot find much to stream. As for streaming TV shows, only The Crown and Wolf Hall hold any interest. Favoured repeats, I must say. Many other TV offerings are skewed, embarrassing, violent, sadistic or, just plain dumb. Marketed shit. From America. As for streaming any flicks, I resort to watching, again, old family favourites. Sense & Sensibility and The KIng’s Speech have seen considerable action of late on my preferred MacBook. I mostly read books.
I do not do Kindle. You, being my own personal in-house eye dottore and out-of-house eye chirurgo, is totally opposed to them. TOTALLY!!! Massive yearly increases in the number of persons infiltrating hospital for Dott. You sought to stem their overuse of Kindles, smart phones, laptops, and personal computers. The screens vibrate. They oscillate. Taxing the eyes which, are sophisticated, highly delicate & sensitive organs. Muscles, maybe? Over-worked. And, once touched, are never to be touched again. Heed this WARNING. I do. I read books.
Ordering is a cinch. Delivery is a bitch. A) Why is delivery so expensive? B) Why is delivery so slow? C) Why must I join amazon Prime, to enjoy any presumed benefits with delivery? Its extra-cost still doesn’t guarantee much more speed… to Italy. About as fast as the proverbial slow boat to/from China. I won’t mention how long it takes with regular delivery. Ditto for amazon.co.uk. And, they have the Royal Mails. One forgets what has been ordered when months pass. While I am at it: what I really dislike is to get a request from amazon.whatever asking for a review, when I still haven’t gotten the book. I have developed a tactic for ordering. I had two but Covid-19 KILLED one… deliver books for free to my Mother’s address in NC and get them on one of my bi-yearly trips to the US. Not any more. The one remaining method is… I go to amazon.com and check price & delivery. I go right up to the point just before clicking ORDER. This gives me great satisfaction. A tease. I do hope amazon.com’s computers notice this ploy. If the situation is untenable, disagreeable, too slow or, too darn expensive then, I hop over to amazon.it and see if the same book is available… in English, thank you very much… and at a reasonable price and with an acceptable delivery date. If A-Okay, then I click ORDER with them. Ta-dah!!! Usually, the delivery costs less and is faster. This is because amazon has its own Boeing B-767s shuttling back ‘n forth across our pandemic plagued planet with books, diapers, athletic gear and other consumer nonsense. I only buy books.
The crux of this post…
I’ve noticed an annoying occurrence over the years with my choices in reading material. Let me state up front that I read non-fiction. I want to know stuff. You collects it. I read about it. Once in a Blue Moon I will delve into a fictional read. That stated… every other year, I have found I must struggle through some tome, which has come highly recommended by The Economist. If not them, then the Sunday Telegraph. It started with India. The Economist wrote the praises of a book describing the Asian sub-continent as circumscribed by a vast network of journeys… spiritual journey’s… like a geographical mandala design, connecting temples, sanctuaries, religious monuments… holy places with semi-naked worshippers!!!… throughout the country and neither constrained by location, vicinities nor, ease of entrance, etc. Means these journeys can take awhile. If you are so disposed to try one out. Many are lost or, nearly forgotten, a few maintained over the millennium right up until today. Gosh, I said, sounds interesting. I want to read about that! I ordered according to the above prescribed tactic and lo’ & behold, a package was on my doorstep in a matter of a few days, thanks to the folk somewhere at amazon.it. I could hardly fathom the work. The 600 + pages of text, clinically, dryly written… to rival any desert in Rajasthan… and so heavily annotated & foot-noted, any fascination about the book’s previously-thought-to-be interesting topic was choked dead on Page 112. Maybe it was Page 35. I don’t remember. No spirit. No anima. Bad photos too. Three attempts and it became obvious the book was a No-pass-go. It is presently gathering dust on a shelf in la Casa Grande’s DR. Doomed never be picked up again.
Problem-less until two years later the same happened. I love History. That along with Geography & Literature, were the only school subjects which garnered my attention and I wasn’t assigned a D-. Those marks were reserved for Math, Chemistry and Physics. Strangled my grade-point average. So be it. I was never going to go to an Ivy League school anyway. Again, undaunted by previous circumstance, I relied upon my primary source, The Economist. The reviewing staff dedicated three long columns to The Glorious Revolution of 1688. The magazine’s kind of stuff. Yes, the revolution was glorious… for the status quo. I felt an urgent need to reacquaint myself with this episode in English History 101. The reviewers had regaled the book’s detailed account. I was not alarmed. I should have been. The book was a repeat of India. Why do some authors… writers to historians to experts… seek to document down to the itzy-bitzy, teenie-wheeniest of nth degrees? Are they vain? Ambitious to impress? Can afford fleets of research assistants, thanks to generous grants? No idea. I don’t want to know. Not even interesting literature. More a doctoral thesis run amok. I am of the opinion, the surest way to KILL a book is to over write it, annotate it, footnote it, bibliography it. It’s like what over-taxation does to economies. One wants, even yearns for, a broad sweep, large breadth, the essential & defining elements. 2/3’s of the way through, I could not have cared a farthing for any of the issues, personalities, vagaries of political exigency of 17th Century England, back when Real Men sported perruques, wore clog-like high heel shoes and skirted jackets with too many buttons. The same said No! to King James II’s attempt at a Louis XIV-style centralised AND heavily Catholic government. A last stand by any English king on much of all that. England later got what it said it didn’t want. A heavily centralised government. Look at Boris. Nothing HM the Queen can do now about either but, grin & bear it. Or, Brexit. Not sure who could say who had won. One dear Dutch Codiponte friend suffered my difficulty for four torturous months to get… through… this… book. I did. Eventually. And, you all may be very much relieved to know none are obligated to ever mention the Glorious Revolution again. An aside… I am alive and an American because, my forebears had fled that island nation just prior to its decapitating a king and suffering a mean & nasty civil war. The shenanigans which followed with Charles II and his brother, James II, afterwards, were of little concern to my ancestors. They were more interested in hacking out of the wilderness enough land to farm the purple waves of majesty… in New Jersey and South Carolina. It is a distinction which lends a certain air to my immigrated pedigree. And, out of the way of England. We have our own special problems in the USofA… and in Italy… and in the EU.
One magnificent and recent read was on Churchill. I bought it used. Less than 250 pages. Literally pocket size. Hardbound! No photos. An exciting dash of nearly ninety years to capture the essence of one of the greatest men in all of Our History. Few annotations. I don’t remember a footnote and the bibliography took up only three and a half pages. The Glorious Revolution one had 53. I adore the man’s story. I adored the book’s version of the man’s story. I just wish I could remember who I have loaned that man’s story out to.
This Summer, I am slogging through Hilary Mantel’s third and last book on Thomas Cromwell… The Mirror And The Light. I keep getting the title mixed up. Light ought to come before the Mirror, no? Someone needed to give a new, fresh look at this extraordinary man in History and Hilary was up to the Mantel. In the preceding years, and happily done, I consumed Wolf Hall and Bringing Up The Bodies. Wolf Hall was a revelation. A kicker. English struck anew. Little use of the personal pronoun for Sir Thomas. None of this… He said… He thought… He went. Instead… Said… Thought. The pages were populated with a cast of personalities & events decorated with Cromwell’s point-of-view at a most interesting and violent moment in English History… post-Wolsey. Barely Renaissance. Very cruel. The second of the first two books, Bringing Up The Bodies, moved methodically, a near thriller, ie how Anne Boleyn would conquer King Henry VIII’s affections and be crowned Queen. The stakes were high, but then, Lady Boleyn had learned those ropes at the French Court, lying down and standing up. Further instruction came from her icky-sticky father, a ruthlessly ambitious Series B nobleman nurtured upon his associations to other aristocratic houses… Duke of Norfolk’s Howard crowd. And at court, Anne, before & after being crowned, manoeuvred the levers of government to grab, via the primacy of her nobility and trained thirst for the fruits of power, to forestall others in gaining ground on those fronts at King Henry VIII’s court. She miscalculated. A spell of Bad Luck. Pulling levers means nothing if you cannot produce a male heir. She didn’t. And so, manipulating government, when all her King wanted was a boy, turned out to be a grotesque miscalculation. She was summarily swarmed by one & all at court and, abandoned by her Lord & Liege for Jane Seymour. Queen Anne quickly came undone, if the book’s accused deviancies are to be believed as Truth. She lost her head. Others annoying persons proceeded her to an early morning appointment to be separated from a head by an axe. All as a traitors. To the King. Vultures usually get to the carrion.
This last Cromwell book is a bore. I think. One already knows the ending. A repeat of a three letter word. Endemic to the times. Takes 912 pages to get to it. So I avoid continuing onwards to that end. And, there is so much competition from… A) il Poggiolo’s garden, B) works in progress inside la Casa Grande… I may write my own ode to dust… C) grocery shopping and filling up the beat-up yet honoured SUV with gas… it now sports a brand new radio and CD player. The Dog and I take drives and listen to Rameau. He chews a stick or, sticks his head out the window while Baroque blares out the speakers… D) other. These many commissions awaiting my attention are quite preferable to reading a lengthy conversation amongst men only on the search for King Henry’s Wife Number Four. If one were to look at it from King Henry’s perspective, it might only be Wife Number Three. Poor Catherine of Aragon. She was demoted to a lonely end. I hem and I haw with guilt. A natural state for me. A remote voice speaks out… Get on with it, son. You have piles of books requiring reading. I pull a pillow over my head to muffle that out.
This historical third novel is similar to a complicated clock mechanism from the 16th Century of gears, levers and pulleys. With each encounter, conversation, episode with King Henry VIII, Princes Mary, the abundant quantity of vying and ill behaved noble men and noble ladies, foreign ambassadors, church prelates, and his large staff and, including even Cromwell’s recollections of his past, causes its mechanism to slowly jog, twist, and click one more turn towards Cromwell’s Destiny. Each, an incremental raising the bar of the aggravations and points of controversy Cromwell had brought to the table in serving his King, dealing with his collaborators & adversaries… low birth, vicinity to the king beyond the nobility’s access, his extensive powers at court, in parliament, with church and state. Cromwell was voraciously accused by all to be a viper, snake, monster, criminal, anti-religious. Oddly, he just reflected those qualities from those who surrounded him. And, Cromwell was more adept at their games. As it happened with Wolsey, Anne Boleyn, and heretics, etc., his luck runs out. It’s very subtle. I must hand it to Hilary Mantel. The history goes sore before you area aware. I have tired to flip back in the book to find at just what point Cromwell’s career becomes dangerously wrong. No success. Reading forward, situations begin to gel or, alter, becoming unmanageable at court and, particularly for Cromwell . The frayed strains of his position unravels irrevocably with Anne of Cleaves appearance in England to marry King Henry VIII. The King provokes a surprise interview with his intended and it did not go well for either one but, most assuredly, for King Henry. I agree with the author… this history, in its entirety of three thick books, cannot be told in broad expanses. It is minutia. All it takes to trip things into a different direction or, end. I am resigned. Nevertheless, I struggle. The last book really must have 912 pages to describe the man, Cromwell, the enormous cast of personalities and the multiple consequences of serving a king who, many have said, was knocked perpetually mean, pathetic… and impotent… by a jousting accident. A concussion trauma. Everyone, in one way or, another looses his head. Each is his or her own way. I have still 178 pages to go. Afterwards, I will pick up a book on garden design… in Tuscany… by who else? A Englishman. We aspire to distract from sweating in the garden, horse-flies & mosquitoes included.