#37 / Mysteries To Me
Hey everyone,
I haven’t told you yet about my quirky side project. I needed something to do that was purely for fun and had no rational purpose. Of course, the truth is that I’m using it to practice some skills, and I can see some potential applications for it down the line. But that will come later; for now it’s still a passionate fling.
It all started with Richard the Lionheart.
I went to read about him on Wikipedia, because I realized I never learned exactly how he’d gotten his epithet, and I was curious. Then I read that he’d never actually spent more than six months in England during his entire reign as king, which seemed very odd for someone who is so lionized (sorry!) in that country. And, well, one thing led to another, and by the end of the night I was reading about composite monarchies and cadet branches and The Anarchy.
Ah, yes, The Anarchy. A delightful name that the Victorians bestowed on the period between the reigns of Henry I and Henry II, when there was a succession crisis, a protracted civil war, and a breakdown in central authority. Pretty fascinating, and with a name like that, I was surprised I’d never heard of it. So I kept studying.
What’s made this different from just a normal Wikipedia rabbit hole is that I’ve been making notes on what I learn. There’s a cool web-native knowledge base tool called Notion that I’ve been meaning to try, and this project was the perfect fit. It lets you create lists, tables, and galleries, link them together, and easily publish them. As I went along, then, I started building a table in Notion of all the monarchs of England. (Technically it now goes back to before England was even a thing, to the Kingdom of Wessex.)
If you’re not thoroughly bored by now, you can take a look. I’ve also started several more charts and a reading list. One really cool thing that’s happened while I’ve been working on this is that Notion has released a “Timeline” view that you can use on any of your tables. The feature is meant to be used for tracking work projects, so it doesn’t exactly have great out-of-the-box support for the 12th century. At least not yet.
Books
You may remember Jay as the giver of Lichtenbergianism (at least, he gave it to me). We are in a creatives’ group together, and I have gotten to follow along as he has written, edited, and published his first book, Novel Advice.
It’s a book of advice columns for our favorite literary characters. They write in to the mysterious but wise Aunt Antigone, and she does her best to reframe the situation for them and show them what they might be missing.
I’m really amazed and proud that Jay wrote such a delightful book amidst all the chaos of 2020, including way more than his fair share. He poured it all into this project, and it shows. Not only are the lessons profound and the prose crackling, but it’s also a low-key puzzle book (because the names of the characters who are writing in only appear in the table of contents, so you can try to guess!).
It makes a great Christmas or Hanukkah or just-because present, especially for any literature lovers on your list. Which gives me the chance to say: if you buy this or any books for the holidays, make sure to use the publishers’ websites, the indie site Bookshop, or your local bookstore. It will probably be a hard winter for the latter; Amazon, on the other hand, will be fine.
I’ve been making steady progress on this one for about a month now and I’m almost done. I’ve heard a lot about Follett over the years, but I never looked into him seriously. I knew he wrote historical fiction, which I love, but I probably shied away knowing that his books are really long, even though that’s never stopped me before—secretly I love long books but I also like to be able to boast that I read such-and-such many books during the year, and long ones knock that total down. I’m getting over the numerical obsession.
I’ve thought about The Pillars of the Earth now and then over the years, but for some reason, it kept popping into my head recently, and I decided to give it a go. And it turns out that it takes place in the exact historical period, The Anarchy, that has attracted me so strongly. I must have known that unconsciously somehow; or it was a fortuitous coincidence. At any rate, it’s giving me a much better picture of what life might have been like in that time. Plus it’s an expertly-told story. You can tell that Follett wrote thrillers before this, because there’s an economy of plot, a fast pace, and just barely enough character development to not feel thin. It’s fun, and I’m getting excited about the idea that there are both sequels and prequels to this.
Reading the preface, I hadn’t realized how crazy popular this book was, especially in Europe—a book that’s ostensibly about the building of a church during a more-or-less forgotten historical period. Follett explains how he got the idea: he was turned onto cathedrals by a book he read as a young journalist, An Outline of European Architecture, which inspired him to take a visit to the nearest one, where he fell in love. This was an obscure book, by an obscure author (Nikolaus Pevsner), and yet, if it hadn’t been written, we wouldn’t have The Pillars of the Earth or any of its follow-ups. How cool is that? And Nikolaus Pevsner could never have known this at the time, since he died before Follett's book was published.
It struck me that if I ever wrote a book, I think I’d rather be Nikolaus Pevsner than Ken Follett. I don't want to be famous; I want to be the one that only the cool kids know about.
Haiku
Taking your anger
You put it into the earth
And become grounded
Mood
Roy Orbison — “She’s a Mystery to Me”
I am genuinely obsessed with this song. It’s popular, so I must have heard it before, but something about it got me hooked this time around. I started listening to Orbison this week because of his inclusion in a set of music DVDs that a friend of mine compiled to chronicle the history of rock music. Volume 2 (1957-1961) has a clip of “Only the Lonely” from a TV special where Orbison is backed by a full band that includes a bunch of people he influenced who are now much bigger stars, like Bruce Springsteen and Elvis Costello.
I decided to listen to his posthumous 1989 album Mystery Girl, which in addition to this song includes “You Got It” and "California Blue," but “She’s a Mystery to Me” is the standout (he must have liked it, too, if he made it the album title). I was delighted to discover that the song was written by another recent obsession of mine, U2 (well, Bono and The Edge, specifically), and that there are great videos of them playing it live.
I love how Orbison pioneered this image of the lonely sad sack who never gets the girl, which was new in rock music at the time, and then stuck with that ethos his whole career. It does get a little repetitive if you listen to dozens of Orbison songs in a row, which we may or may not have done. But then his voice is so soothing and warm that it makes up for any tiredness/boredom/sameness with the material.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7FMXSSzIRW8aJwUPfzXsa2?si=eUPGkX5iT8K6Eccc1VJbVw
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Thanks for reading. Please take care, and write back if you can!
Love,
Aaron