For obvious reasons, I’m not getting out much. But even sequestered away it is hard to escape how mad everyone in Britain has gone for the online pub quiz. Myself, I went with online chess for a few weeks as my ritualistic bit of fun, but that fell away at some point and now in its place has arisen the New Yorker’s online crossword. Thanks to partner mode it has even become vaguely social. And I couldn’t finish one of them on my own.
It has become de rigueur in academia to talk about imposter syndrome and the ways you can diminish yourself mentally by constantly comparing yourself to your peers. If you are afflicted by this I recommend avoiding the bios of the crossword compilers. They are a precocious and accomplished bunch — the youngest being the worst offenders. They’ve had careers in silicon valley, published books, involved in research and advocacy, write film criticism. Some of the clues are too clever for their own good, if you ask me.
I’m waiting for “lockdown bod” to enter in general usage. It should refer to either the weight gain following from the enforced sedentary lifestyle and comfort eating, or the effect of the hundreds of press-ups and crunches churned out to access those sweet endorphins. So far it hasn’t even registered on the urban dictionary. They do have a pretty amusing definition for “lockdown” though.
I’ve been reading my way through Claire Tomalin’s biography of Samuel Peyps. Pepys’ celebrated diary covers a particularly interesting decade of English history (1660-1669). It was the start of restoration England. Briefly, this means that after a civil war England had replaced the Monarchy with a man called Oliver Cromwell, who subsequently and inevitably died, leaving a power vacuum that they resolved by simply restoring the monarchy, bringing Charles II back to England as King. Bear in mind that his father, Charles I, had been fought against and ultimately executed by many of the same people who were now bringing him back.
This was also the decade of the Great Fire of London and the Great Plague of London. The latter being the final in a long series of outbreaks that seemed to resurface every decade or so. We are beginning to get a little first hand appreciation of how plague affected the lives of those who lived through it. Take the following from a recent New Yorker article on Shakespeare and the plague:
As a shareholder and sometime actor in his playing company, as well as its principal playwright, Shakespeare had to grapple throughout his career with these repeated, economically devastating closings. There were particularly severe outbreaks of plague in 1582, 1592-93, 1603-04, 1606, and 1608-09. The theatre historian J. Leeds Barroll III, who carefully sifted through the surviving records, concluded that in the years between 1606 and 1610—the period in which Shakespeare wrote and produced some of his greatest plays, from “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra” to “The Winter’s Tale” and “The Tempest”—the London playhouses were not likely to have been open for more than a total of nine months.
What Shakespeare actually wrote about the plague – Stephen Greenblatt
Pepys was heavily involved in the government of the day — he was a naval administrator during the period he wrote the diary and later would become an MP. It is not hard to compare Pepys’ time of political upheaval and plague with our own time of Brexit and pandemic. If the Diary were to exist today it would be a little like Dominic Cummings keeping a private blog to record the arguments with his wife alongside the details of his work as Boris Johnson’s personal advisor. The real innovation of the diary was Pepys’ decision to record not just his professional activities and first hand accounts of events in London, but also his unsparing depiction of his own personal life.
In one particular respect Peyps comes out of his own account very badly, as alludes to his casual harassment and describes the outright exploitation of women in detail. His misdeeds line up pretty precisely with many of the reports that have come out during the #metoo era. He would take advantage both of the female servants employed in his home, other houses he was a guest at, and the young daughters in families he developed a half friendly, half patronage relationship with. A reader of Pepys’ diaries is left to deduce how the women might have really felt about Pepys’s behavior; present day accounts of exactly the same kinds of abuse provide a convincing answer.
Nothing happening today really feels at all novel when held up against the full perspective of history. We may look at the current culture wars, or the 5G and QAnon conspiracy theories, and wonder to ourselves what the world is coming to. Pepys was caught up in the Popish plot — a public hysteria based on the idea there was a Catholic conspiracy to overthrow Protestantism in England. Although he wasn’t Catholic, he had political connections to the King’s Catholic brother, and this led to a brief stint in the Tower of London.
The manner in which the sordid (or “convoluted” if you prefer a less pejorative term) details of the King’s personal life became a matter of public scrutiny feels very reminiscent of certain heads of state today.
The King’s policy of alliance with Catholic France was generally disliked. So was the fact that he had not only a Catholic wife but Catholic mistresses; some of Nell Gwyn‘s popularity came from her supposed merry declaration, ‘I am the Protestant whore.’
Samuel Pepys – The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
Nell Gwyn had been a celebrity in her own right, aside from being one of the King’s many mistresses. The quote is provocative enough in its re-appropriation of the accusation that it feels quite modern – good enough for a T-shirt or twitter bio.
I’ve been doing remote classes and consultation sessions, so I’ve spent a lot of time with my old Wacom tablet. While it seems that many of my peers have opted for the iPad and tablet option, I think I much prefer having a desktop computer with a large LCD monitor set at the right height. It has been a long time since I drew any comics, but I decided to entertain the kids with the above doodle before class started.