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random-lil-illing · 5 months ago

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i love making headcanons and, inspired by @blakenation1 making dps headcanons, i wanted to try it out too :)

so, dead poets society going to a mall!!

- mr keating goes with the dead poets to the mall to act as adult supervision since Welton requires the students to have a chaffeur. he just enables their chaotic behaviour though and literally does not act like adult supervision at all - he tells the dead poets that if any other teacher (especially mr nolan) asked, he was watching them like a hawk the entire time (he wasn't, he was watching them like a mole)

- they manage to run into ginny and chris in the mall and the two just sort of. join their group for funsies

- the group is sort of split into three categories: the ones having fun, the ones who are just here for shopping, the ones who want to go home

- people who are actually having fun: neil, charlie, mr keating, chris, meeks, and todd

- they actually love the mall because of all the places they get to go and the aesthetic in general (like neil, chris, charlie, and a little bit of mr keating) OR they found a store they really like and are just browsing what they have (todd in a bookstore, meeks with casettes/records/posters, and mr keating at a thrift shop). the latter need to be physically dragged away from the stores they chose to be in

- the ones who just wanna get their shopping done: cameron, pitts, ginny, knox

- they don't hate the mall, but they're not giddy or excited about it like the people having fun are. they're still somewhat enjoying themselves because of the people around them or because they found a nice store. either way, they're mostly focused on actually shopping for what they NEED

- the ones who wanna go home: todd, cameron, a little bit of meeks

- they get overstimulated outside of their chosen stores very easily :( the food court is loud and bright (they're just like me fr)

- they mostly split up to go to whatever store they want to, but they plan when they're going to meet up at the food court so they can all go together. cameron, ginny, mr keating, and knox all just regularly check their watches to make sure they're not late to the food court meetings while everyone else has to set alarms to remember (especially meeks and todd, since they're so immersed in their respective stores)

- charlie's running around with neil from store to store, browsing each store and buying a couple things from each. they visit the shops everyone else is in to hang out with them a little and talk about what they're buying. sometimes they go to drag the other poets somewhere else because they're spending too much time in one place. neil spends a lot of time with todd in the bookstore, and in turn charlie talks about different records with meeks

- chris will occasionally join along with charlie and neil to talk with the others, but mainly sticks with ginny and knox, who are happy to follow her around as she browses each store. she usually ends up in stored that ginny and knox needed to go to anyway. they buy each other jewellery and other gifts, and point at couple things or plushies and go 'us'

- cameron came into the mall with the intention of sticking strictly to business and simply getting what he needed, but he gave up pretty quickly when he saw just how unserious everyone was being about the whole thing. don't get them wrong, they still got what they needed, but they let themself be taken places too. they even buy the others a couple of things too

-charlie is spoiling EVERYONE, especially neil and the girls. oh, this costs a little too much for their liking? don't worry about it baby, charlie will pay. they can't justify buying something for that price? charlie can! they're eyeing this thing but know that their parents will be mad if they buy it with their money? buy it with charlie's money! charlie is loaded, and what better way to spend his money than on his partners friends? he himself is mainly buying magazines or books, and clothes too. random trinkets too (he buys a mini sax figurine)

- pitts is mainly trying to buy stuff for the radio, along with other projects he wants to start. whenever any of the other poets come around to the store he's in, he'd ask them to visit meeks next and remind her to drink water or to straighten their posture or to take a break in general (modern au! pitts would just call/text meeks to tell her to do so) since it reminds him to do it himself too. he also buys a couple posters and merch in general of his favourite pieces of media to put in his room back at home, or subtly place around his dorm at Welton

- neil is trying not to spend too much of his allowance, and he's succeeding because charlie's buying everything for him, despite his protests. he can't even buy just what he thinks is necessary either, because charlie eill catch him staring longingly at something he wants and buys it. he buys things like flowers, props and very extravagant accessories for future plays and such. and jewellery, so much jewellery. he's also buying things that remind him of everyone else in the friend group, and he and charlie jokingly buy everyone nail polish (which they all end up loving and, by the end of the weekend, they all have matching nails)

- mr keating is buying the wackiest things from the thrift shop - weird and honestly haunted looking decorations? he's taking them. dad-joke shirts? into the cart they go. random trinkets he knows the dead poets will love? buying. he also buys some subtle pride merch, just to let his students know he's a safe space for them. though, he has a feeling they already know, based off of the way they freely talk about stuff like that in front of him

- todd, chris and neil LOVE the perfume (and scented candle) aisle, and they pass by it multiple times while in the make-up store - it's why todd and neil follow her and meeks into there. though, meeks, while occasionally dipping into the make-up store, avoids the perfume aisle like the plague. her senses are extremely sensitive, especially her sense of smell, and the strong perfumes make her sneeze and breathe weird. she quietly encourages the poets in the perfume aisle from the other side of the store

- chris and ginny dip in and out of women's clothing stores and occasionally drag meeks in with them. meeks feels a little shy there but chris and ginny hype her up so much it's hard to feel nervous. they all help each other pick out clothed that suit them and help them feel comfy in clothes they like but are nervous about

- ginny definitely frequents the thrift store too, she just loves the vibes of the clothes there, and she's in and out of the arts and crafts store too. they spend an absurd amount of money in the crafts store (same), and they definitely have stuff they don't need in their bags, but she's happy and besides, charlie covered half the cost, and chris covered the other half. she also buys any necessities she needs, but mainly trinkets from the crafts store

-chris definitely spends some time in the more 'girly' stores (make-up, women's clothes, jewellery, etc.) but she also buys a fair amount of merch for her favourite shows and games (unrelated but i think modern! chris and ginny would play call of duty together - if they can't beat a campaign mission or online round, they ask chet to help). also she buys 'weird' trinkets that remind her of her friends/partners

- also, charlie, knox, todd, cameron, and meeks, the instrument kids, definitely visit the music store a couple of times. charlie brings up the idea of sneaking a piano into Welton and while it's entertained for a minute ot two, meeks eventually rules it out as impossible

- the food court is extremely overstimulating for cameron, todd, and meeks. throughout an all-day trip to the mall, they have three scheduled meal times in the food court (brunch, lunch, befor-dinner-meal). each time they go there they get more and more worn out and by the end of it they're all one inconvenience away to breaking down. cameron and todd at this point desperately want to go home, while meeks, despite knowing that if she doesn't go home now, she'll be throwing up soon but also she wants to stay at the casette store a little longer. still, it's a breath of relief for them all when mr keating finally announces it's time to go back to the campus

- mr keating drops chris and ginny back off at home since they walked to the mall and, with arms full of stuff, they would have a hard time walking back home or taking the bus. it's... definitely a tight fit in the car, and someone has to sit on someone else's lap or on the floor, but they manage. everyone pretends not to notice that both of them get dropped off at ginny's house, even though chris doesn't live there

- by the time they get back to the dorms, everyone has arms full of bags, and all the other teachers give disapproving looks to mr keating, like 'you were supposed to control them >:(' and mr keating, arms also full of bags, most of which aren't even his, just shrugs with a smile. they had fun, that's what was important!

i'm so sorry these are all so long, i love elaborating in my headcanons. and i apologise if some of my headcanons (cough cough transfem meeks) are a little too in your face during this

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literary-illuminati · 2 years ago

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Book Review 5 - The Bright Ages by Matthew Gabrielle and David M. Perry

Okay, the Harper Collins strike is over, so I can finally post this! As you might notice, the wait has meant I have ended up writing far too much of it. Turns out people really are telling the truth when they say writing negative reviews is funner and easier.

Anyway, I did not like this book! It’s an ungainly thing, torn halfway between wanting to be pop history and wanting to be an intervention in the discourse, and entirely too short to do either well. Insofar as is it history, it’s far less revolutionary than it seems to think it is, and the subjects it actually focuses on either already fit entirely into the pop understanding the book is positioning itself against, or else entirely about symbolism and architecture and generally abstracted from (being partial and small-minded) the stuff I’m actually interested in.

All that said the first and fundamental is pretty simple – it’s just altogether too short to do what it wants to. The book tries to be a history of the European Middle Ages – a thousand years of history for an entire continent (more than, given the repeated digressions about the Middle East and also the Mongols one time) – in 200 pages. Which is just, like, I mean I don’t want to say impossible, but I can’t really see any way you’d do it. Which means what we actually get is a series of snapshots, scattered across space and time – just specific, particular dynamics or situations that rarely have much to do with each other. I’m pretty sure the only specific place we ever return to after focusing on it is Ravenna, and that’s for a big, dramatic bookend starting the age with Galla Placidia and ending with Dante. Also the return is really more about Italian city states as a whole. Which is to say only Florence gets any detail at all.

A necessary causality of the snapshot approach is that there’s wide swathes of the period that just, aren’t mentioned in the slightest. Which again, fair, but also it’s a bit much for one of the lacuna to be the entire Holy Roman Empire, right? (Okay, not the entire, there’s repeated off hand mentions of Emperors, and also talk of how the Italian city-states fought the Empire. Just never any description whatsoever of what it, like, was. Except for the specific disavowal of saying it started with Charlemagne, which was never followed up on.) Which is still better than what Poland or Hungary or Lithuania or Kievan Rus got – if any of them were even mentioned, it was only off hand. Which does end up giving the impression that Medieval Europe included Jerusalem but not Krakow – to be fair, something a lot of actual Medieval people might have totally agree with. But given the amount of time spent on the Crusades to the Levant and the Albigensian Crusade, not even mentioning the bloody Christianize of the Baltic in passing feels negligent to the point of being actively misleading.

Also it’s weird, given the books whole focus on connections and commerce between Europe and the rider world – the steppe is right there! You don’t need to wait for the Mongols!

Speaking of – they give a bunch of apologia for the Mongol Empire that’s – well, basically the same stuff all empires get, brought safety to the roads and allowed free movement and trade, brought people together, spread culture and technology, enlightened and cosmopolitan, etc. Which I mostly just find funny because of how obvious it is the authors would, uh, probably not endorse the same sentiment for any more recent imperial projects.

But okay – it’s not that you can’t tell a useful history in what might seem to be way too little space – John Darwin tries to tell a literal history of the world from the 16th century in ~500 pages and I’d still say After Tamerlane is absolutely worthwhile reading. You just need, you know, discipline. Focus. A firm idea of your thesis and an obsession of what’s relevant to it (or just be entertaining and full of fun memorable trivia). So, what are Perry and Gabrielle actually trying to do here?

Honestly, it’s a little bit unclear? The thesis they present is that the Dark Ages didn’t exist – they insist on referring the whole Medieval period as ‘the Bright Ages’ through the entire book, it’s incredibly annoying – and that the Medieval period get a horribly unjustified bad wrap as uniquely cruel and provincial and barbaric and full of disease, illiteracy, superstition, etc. They explicitly position themselves as being a reaction to the vision of the past you see in Game of Thrones or Vikings (I’d say ‘or the Witcher’ but again, for the purposes of this book Eastern Europe doesn’t exist). Instead, they fill the book with hand picked examples of medieval beauty, sophistication, and connection to the wider world with the quite explicit contention that everything good about the Renaissance (and later) was really just outgrowths of the Medieval, and it was only the bad stuff that was new.

(At the same time, they also do not like white nationalists, and go out of their way at length on numerous occasions to remind you that Nazis are bad. Those digressions do always leave me wondering who they’re for – no actual Deus Vult type is going to get more than five pages into it, and they rarely get much deeper that surface level refutation of things no one else is likely to actually believe.)

Anyway – look, the central, overriding problem of the book is that it’s not nearly as revolutionary as it seems to think it is. Very problematic, when it has such a high opinion of itself for being so. The assorted trivia the book uses as shocking examples of how cosmopolitan and tolerant the period was mostly just, well, fit perfectly fine into the popular imagining of the Medieval era? Like ‘royals and elites imported foreign luxury goods and status symbols at great expense; missionaries, adventurers and religious emissaries travelled across Eurasia to preach, trade and try to find someone to help them invade Muslims ; women often wielded significant political influence by virtue of royal birth of marriage, and were active political players’ – are these statements shocking to literally anyone? Basically all of that literally happens in Game of Thrones!

Part of that is that the book keeps almost committing to a really radical thesis – not to say pure unreconstructed romanticism, but close to it – and then always has an attack of professional ethics and cringes away from it, and just awkwardly brings up how, to be sue, there were serfs and slaves and atrocities, but nonetheless when you think about it the later Crusader States really were fascinating sites of cultural exchange, or whatever.

Psychoanalyzing the authors is bad form, of course, but like – reading this book the overriding sense you get is that they’re proud progressives, and have dedicated their lives to studying the Medieval era. But in the contemporary discourse people on their side use ‘Medieval’ as an insult to mean patriarchal, or brutal, or cruel, and the people who like the Medieval era are all in the Sack of Jerusalem Fandom. The sheer angst and righteous indignation they have about this state of affairs just about oozes through every page – honestly if I’m being maximally pithy and uncharitable, you rather get the sense that the real aim of the book is to make ‘being really into Medieval history’ a less reactionary-coded interest to bring up at professional-class dinner parties.

But honestly I could have forgiven almost all of this if the anecdotes and snapshots the book did focus on were informative and interesting. And this is almost entirely pure personal preference, I fully acknowledge but – the things that the book chose to focus on just really weren’t, to me?

Which is to say that The Bright Ages is incredibly interested in architectural and monumental symbolism, especially of the religious variety – there are whole chapters overwhelmingly dedicated to exploring the layout of churches and how their architecture and lighting was meant to convey meaning, or detailing at great length a specific monumental cross in northern England. These are used as synecdoches for broader topics, of course but, like, an awful lot of word count really is dedicated to describing how Gala Placedia’s chapel in Ravenna must have wowed people. And even as far as using them as synecdoches – the way that monasteries, bishops and the royal household in Paris competed to have the most impressive church/chapel as a way to convey religious authority is genuinely interesting, but I’d honestly have rather heard a lot more of the actual politics and sociology or how sacred authority and legitimacy was gathered around the Capetians in the later middle ages and a lot less about how specifically impressive the royal chapel on the palace grounds was. There’s a massive amount of symbolic and artistic detail, a fair amount of time spent charting great thinkers and proving that there was too such a thing as a Medieval intellectual, and almost none at all on, like, political and social and (god forbid) economic history. Which are, unfortunately, the bits of it I’m actually interested in.

The book isn’t just architecture of course, but much of the rest is either very basic – yes, the vikings were traders as well as raiders and travelled shockingly long distances, yes there was intellectual interchange between Muslim, Jewish and Christian thinkers across the Mediterranean, yes the Church acted as a vital sponsor of learning and scholarship. I’m sure these are new information to like, someone? - or so caught up in historiographical arguments and qualifications that it loses sight of the actual subject – I swear the book spent more time saying that it’s wrong to call it a Carolingian Renaissance because that implies there were actual dark ages before and after than it does explaining why anyone actually would.

Beyond that – okay, so as mentioned this book is really consciously progressive. Which, beyond a certain antiquarian distaste for how desperately they’re trying to get across ‘see, our field of study is Relevant! And Important! Please please please give us tenure/prestige/funding’ I wholly support. (I mean, like, I do think Medieval Studies deserves tenure/prestige/funding. Just slightly unbecoming to so transparently be grasping for it, and also more than a bit self-defeating) - but, like, the book’s politics are weird? Or weirdly surface level and slightly confused, given how much of the book is focused around them.

Like – the book spends a massive amount of time and attention combating the myth that women in the middle ages were all cloistered and politically mute and totally powerless. But the sum total of what it actually says is ‘did you know: elite women in the aristocracy and church exercised political influence? And a lot of the Christianization of western Europe happened through highborn christian women marrying pagan kings and raising their children Christian?” And while I suppose ‘elite women have influence even in patriarchal societies’ is a useful fact for someone to learn, I’m not sure examples that more or less cash out to ‘queens could have power by manipulating their husbands and sons’ is a particularly novel or progressive take, you know? More broadly – it’s a weakness of the book’s framework of jumping across countries and centuries between anecdotes that we never get any sense of gender roles and how power and influence were gendered systemically, so much as single (or if you’re very lucky, two or three) particular women with a vague gesture that they’re kind of typical. Not to complain about a lack of theory, but there’s really basically zero theory.

The book’s choices of examples for women to focus on are also – okay, not to be all ‘why didn’t you talk about my faves’, but insofar as you’re talking how women were able to exercise power, it’s really very odd that you never talk about any women who, like, ruled in their own right? C’mon, you mention the Anarchy offhand to introduce Eleanor of Aquitaine but don’t even say what it was about, let alone talk about the Empress Matilda? (I’d say the same thing about Matilda of Tuscany and the investiture Controversy, but it’s not like the book actually talks about the Investiture Controversy beyond the absolute basics, so). The final result is a book that talks a lot about how elite women had influence, and then the influence they actually bring up is almost always of the most stereotypically feminine-gender variety imaginable.

All that really pales to how confused the book seems when it talks about Christianity. Which it has to, of course, fairly constantly – it’s a book about Medieval Europe. But it’s kind of horribly torn between two imperatives here – on the one hand, it desperately wants to fight back against the whole black legend of the tyrannical, book-burning, Galileo-murdering, science-suppressing hopelessly venal and corrupt, all-powering Magesterium. But on the other, they really don’t want to come off as supporting, well, the heretic murdering and antisemitism or being the sort of guy online who posts memes of the Knights Templar. So you see this somewhat exhausting two-step where they go on at length about all the beautiful architecture and scholarship preservation the church did interrupted every so often by this concession about how of course it wasn’t all good and obviously pogroms and burning heretics wasn’t great, but- (The chapter on the vikings is much the same, except with a much clearer ‘it’s important not to romanticize these people because the people who do that are white nationalists, but also see how tolerant and far-ranging and cool they are?’)

Discussing the Church is also a place where the book’s whole allergy to social structure and institutions really serves it poorly. I at a certain point stopped keeping count of the number of times where the book called out that the centralized, papal-centric Church was a creation of the high middle ages, and not at all how things worked for most of the period. But then they just never actually explain how they worked instead, or really even how things changed to so enshrine the Pope’s power. They talk about how convents could be wealthy and powerful landholders and their abbesses’ wield significant power, but never even gesture at explaining how they interfaced with the institutional church. It’s really very frustrating.

Of course Christianity still gets far better treatment than Judaism or Islam – there’s a chapter which goes into some detail on the life of Maimonides in the process of extolling Medieval scholarship and talking about how classical learning was never really lost and the Renaissance is fake news. But despite the gestures to the presence of Jewish communities throughout Europe there’s essentially zero, like, description of how they actually functioned, or were organized, or (aside from the occasionally mentioned pogroms) how they interacted with their christian neighbours. The treatment of Islam is much the same – there are some mentions of the Islamic wold and its intellectual traditions, but essentially just to rehash the same points about the Islamic Golden age and Ibn Sina and all the other bits of trivia everyone probably picked up keeping up with the culture war during the Bush Administration. But again, only the most passing mentions of, like, politics or organization or even theology. It felt gratingly cursory, given the emphasis placed on the fact that eg Al Andulas was clearly part of Medieval Europe

Underneath all this is just the fact that The Bright Ages is almost an entirely a history of the elite. Peasants, serfs and slaves only exist in the for the sake of concessions about how of course things weren’t all good. The book has almost no interest in the lives of the lower classes, and barely seems to realize this. It starts to really, really grate, especially when you’re making all these implicit judgments about how the Medieval era was compared to what came after – in which case, the lives of, like, 90% of the population are rather important! Like unironically peasant life is fascinating! What did life actually look like of the overwhelmingly majority of people? If you want to give a sketch of the entire era, it’s kind of important.

I’m almost certainly being unfair here – basically everything about the book’s sensibilities grated on me, so I can’t say I was trying to be especially charitable. But really – the book’s perfectly fine light reading, but as intentional propaganda is hamfisted and it’s unclear who it’s for, and as an actual history it’s just...bad. It’s useful as a way to get a sense of the discourse, I guess, but otherwise I couldn’t really recommend it.

#Book Review #The Bright Ages #Matthew Gabrielle #David M. Perry #history #sorry this is so long

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