Chronic conditions occasionally wrought havoc on succession orders. In the age of Roman emperors there was the reputed madness of Caligula. In the line of American presidents, there was Grover Cleveland's oral cancer, a successfully held state secret and surgery that could have gone the other way, and there was Woodrow Wilson's stroke, and in the ever entertaining line of English Tudors, there was the sickly Edward6, a Catholic Mary, and the great virgin Liz1, of whom Renaissance students can never get enough. Lady Jane, in and of itself, is a curious film, with Patrick Stewart giving a kind of innocuous Merchant Ivory flavor in a supporting role as the duke whose loyalty is doomed. The violence in the film is ornamental, as in fact most period videos about the Tudors are, almost like a postcard. I have the film on my watchlist for additional review, but I am not sure when I'll get to it, having had a difficult weekend, from which I am trying to spare you.
I thought my little adventure into what remains of Philadelphia's historic leisured class would... how can I put it? Open a last venue, of sorts, but when I got back in, I had a furious battle; there is something about putting up one's nose against old money, and I feel, quite simply, defeated, a broken swizzle stick with a jagged fracture.
I'll never have what I want, and it is killing me, partly why I have avoided the merits, the detractions, of JK Rowling and her legacy. There are not many authors, world over, whose franchise simply steamrolled its way into that kind of wealth. She broke the chains of her state socialism. I have failed, and it will not only be a conceptually difficult issue for me; it may become one of stark choices.
No comments:
Post a Comment