collections: a semi-seasonal reset
New year, new letter.
When you reset for a new year, you have to scrape-off and discard the decayed remainders of the last year. When you’re stripped clean, you’re reminded that there are a few things you still enjoy doing below the caked-on layers of being too busy to do something. I’ve found the temporary vigor to write about nothingness again, and for that I am thankful.
- listen up and let me tell you a story: six wives reclaim the musical narrative
- the library card: plastic keys to an infinite universe
- sunbursts and marble halls: your reality is effervescent
💌
listen up and let me tell you a story
six wives reclaim the musical narrative from henry viii
There is something truly miraculous about the things you learn in high school. Those formative years cram facts and formulas into your growing brain, some of which will never see the light of day again but a lot of which will resurface in entirely unsuspecting ways. I’ve been listening to the cast recording of Six: The Musical, and it’s a time-warp to 16th century England on the stage of Britain’s Got Talent. The Tudors are a fascinating royal dynasty, but it feels a little outlandish to have the full context for the English Reformation in the gossip-drenched pages of the European history book.
The scene is AP European History, sophomore year of high school. We’re somewhere in the Age of Reformation and transcribing notes from the blackboard on the origin story of the Anglican Church. Top notes of flouting the dominant Catholic order and heart notes of Henry VIII’s uncontrolled libido prompting the union of church and state. For love or whatever.
This came shortly after a time when Henry VIII and some of his more infamous wives were all the rage. Henry VIII and the selfishly mythical love story that surrounds him and formed the Church of England for the allure of a Boleyn girl, swoons historical romance. Trade a country for a woman. The fixation emerges as The Other Boleyn Girl (2008; modern history has entirely forgotten this movie was ever made) and a star-vehicle for Natalie Dormer in The Tudors (2007-2010; nobody in real life has ever seen this show but the internet definitely has). The lionization of Henry VIII is mirrored in a fascination with Hades and Persephone: a powerful man can’t have what he wants so he rewrites the rules.
We’re not here to do a feminist revision of the Anglican church (though I’m sure John Merriman is not up to that task), even as his six ex-wives have been dignified and denigrated like no others. We get it, six wives is a lot of wives, and we seem to be incapable of moving on from this piece of historical trivia. Things ended terribly for nearly all of them, but especially poor Anne. Anne, a vessel for all the roles she may or may not have occupied in history: Anne Boleyn as the temptress; Anne Boleyn as the wronged woman; Anne Boleyn as the conniving Lady Macbeth. A woman in proximity to power whose story only ends in one way: off with her head. When her head is off, her replacement cycles in with a new wedding ring.
Back to Six: The Musical, a show-stopping riot of songs from the perspective of the ex-wives. It’s bombastic, unapologetic, and deeply empathetic. Henry is Henry, but there are three Catherines, two Annes, and a Jane. Literature loves its alternate-gender perspective retellings, yet this musical is crafted such that it’s less of a retelling and more of a rewriting. By the end, you want the very best for each of them, and truly believe they’re victorious in their own way. The final number pulls a revisionist history and tells their story sans the beheadings and divorces and death. And it’s beautiful.
Six also turned historemix into a real word, and somewhere out there in the world, Lin Manuel Miranda is picking up another biography at the airport.
the library card
plastic keys to an infinite universe
This is a small meditation on libraries. I signed up for a library card recently: filled out an application form, handed over my electricity bill as proof of residence, and received a small plastic card in return.
eight.
When you’re a kid, the library is a third home. It’s the stop between your actual home, school, and the place you would beg your parents on a free weekend. That’s what my dad would do: he’d use one of his precious days off to drive me to the local library branch and spend most of his afternoon wandering the aisles of international books so I could maximize my precious time in this sacred church. (And when I think about all the things my parents have done for me in the course of my lifetime, I think of these moments. Our tradition of Sundays at the local library. I wonder how different I’d be today if these afternoons never existed). I wasn’t tall enough to look over the library counter, and remember standing on my tip-toes as my dad filled out the application form—and soon, I was handed a card with my name scrawled on the back. It was mine. I would peruse books and stack them high on the ground, adding them to my “check-out” pile; and my heart would skip a beat when I realized a new copy of a book had entered circulation after I exhausted the rest of the series. I’d sign up for a slot at the library computers and indulge myself in a few hours of my favorite sites on high-speed internet: this was my first, enduring taste of the world wide web and the rest of it is simply modern history. You didn’t believe it the first time when you were sitting cross-legged on the reading mat—stringing letters into words and words into new sentences more elaborate than the last—but reading is a lifelong love affair.
fourteen.
When you’re still in school, but decidedly older, the library remains a place in your neighborhood. A permanent fixture that becomes an errand pit stop rather than a full-day destination. I would attempt to maintain a reading habit and occasionally borrow books to sustain keeping up with book series I’d already sunk too much time in. The timbre of this relationship shifts when you no longer discovery books at the library: you become fluent on the ways of the internet and the recommendations it pushes upon you. It tells you if you like this piece of content, you’ll likely like this other thing because other strangers have already connected those dots as data points. This chain reaction is how you cultivate your taste in likes and dislikes. The books you read are the Classics foisted upon you by your beloved English teachers, but also the Contemporaries that teach you how writing lives and breathes in the real world. You begin to disambiguate fiction from nonfiction in craft and form.
nineteen.
When you’re a college student, the library is a campus institution. I stopped going to the local library during college. The library became the school library, of which there were many: a landmark of towering marble with cavernous depths, a stout building that rhymed with lament, a remodeled playground whose costs exceeded utility. The library no longer place of refuge, but a self-flagellating site of misery. You went to the library to study. You stopped by the library for the temporary respite that would enable you to finish homework in-between commitments. You went to the library to hunker down and finish an essay or final project by insulating yourself from the infinite distractions that threatened your productivity. The library was utilitarian and transitory. The environment steeped in the desperation of productivity. “I’m going to the library” as a bad thing, because when you were at the library, you secluded yourself from all the other stuff you could be doing. A hiding place.
now.
When you’re older, the library is a mystery. It’s been a while since you’ve visited, properly. You’re in a new city (or maybe the same city), and the library is a place again. You forget that you can simply walk into a library for free during open hours. You’ve come of age in this place: not inside, but of and around it.
You notice different things. You no longer fit in at the youth corner (though you’re no less awkward), and meander through the main atrium where the adult books dwell. Books that were once too long and complicated for you to consider. They are primed with best sellers and recommendations from librarians. You trace your finger over a few spines, turn over to the back blurb for another few. You could read all these books if only you had the time.
You’re a paltry shell of the voracious reader you once recall. Your reading list expands infinitely, and then collapses into failed mockery at the end of your Goodreads year. You’re awestruck that all these books are real and at your disposal: all you need to do is pluck them off the shelf, walk toward the check-out counter, and return them in two weeks time. In your library-less years, you’ve developed a habit of buying books off Amazon for delivery to your front door, or downloading digital imprints onto iBooks and stealing moments on a commute to read them.
Something else sharpens into focus of your periphery: all the senior folks sprawled throughout the building. They’re reading newspapers, typing slowly on their small personal computers, half dozed-off in a corner. This is their refuge, where they go to spend their days in the company of words and others. The years blur and you’re suddenly seized with the seismic wonder that children and seniors are one and the same. Kindred spirits who know where they belong.
But the library’s always been here; you remember that now. It’s been an odyssey, but you’re back.
sunbursts and marble halls
your reality is effervescent
Anne of Green Gables is my favorite book I’ve never actually read—I do own a paperback copy somewhere, though the spine has never been cracked. I still mourn for the short-lived but brilliant CBC x Netflix adaptation, Anne with an E; which I’d recommend to anyone I wish well because these three seasons will make your heart explode in tender happiness. Anne’s story feels so familiar, and I’ve observed her story secondhand so many times that I can describe all the beats of her idyllic Avonlea life. Broken slates and bosom friendships.
If I could cite my sources and quote some of my favorite writings, they’d sound like echoes of L.M. Montgomery too. A Canadian pastoral that’s really a coming of age story about a young girl with ambitious as far and wide as the open sky and fields before her. Anne (with an E) is and isn’t a stand-in for the dreamers who wish they could keep dreaming, because even when she suffers, she maintains her unrelenting belief in the good of the world molded to her rosy gaze. This girl as she grows up to a young woman as the series evolves, and she’s supported as much as she supports herself in her unflinching faith in Anne.
Her story is about having something to believe in, and when there isn’t much of anything else, that something is someone. When Weike Wang recently reviewed a VR-ified Avonlea for The New Yorker, the review begins to interrogate why we’d put on a headset to transport ourselves to a 19th century Prince Edward Island. It tells a self-insertion narrative that starts at one end, and breaks when things get hard (in this virtual fantastical reality, you can leave when you’re ahead), or persist through to the happy ending (it’s all rather quaint). From here, we draw a connecting line to Jia Tolentino’s Pure Heroines essay, where young girls are immortalized in the crystal clarity of free spirits in a constrained world. Bright lights that burn to their ends as they age, when they are no longer the heroine in the story. But Anne never loses her light, nor do we ever picture her beyond her early years as a red-headed orphan. That’s where her story starts, and I can tell it to this day.
this new year
- watching: euphoria (season 02)
- read: “posting for posterity”
- “But mostly, I am learning to let go. I am learning to trust that what matters will stick.”
- listened: del water gap, jeremy zucker (the theme of this is a very misplaced sad indie boy revival)
(a/n: unintentionally, the first collection of this year revolved around the stories of young women named anne and the place where i likely first encountered those stories. perhaps that’s the theme.)