Five things I was enthusiastic about this week

Including Middlemarch, English history, and Katherine May's notebooks

1. First enthusiam: the

   FrizzLit
   Middlemarch book club! We’re heading into our final six weeks, and I’ll be sorry to see it end. What an absolute joy the whole experience has been.
   Christopher Frizzelle
   is a brilliant teacher. And holy cats, what an impressive cohort! As in: if I start singing the praises of my fellow classmates, I’ll sound like I’m name-dropping. These are giant minds. Brainy, knowledgeable, multitalented, funny, insightful. And with a lot of niche expertise that lends depth and context to our discussions.
   
   The class meets via Zoom on Saturday mornings, discussing four or five chapters each week. This is my third time reading Middlemarch. The first time, I read for plot: gulped it down, desperate to know what happened next. The second time, ten years later, I read slowly, savoring; it was what I think of as an empathy-read, where your reader experience centers on emotions. You’re feeling everything with them; you’re inside their heads, yearning or soaring or grieving along with them.
   
   This time, in this amiable class-discussion context, I’m reading as a writer. Eliot’s craft knocks my socks off. For example: these past few weeks, I’ve been obsessed with a theme she’s been playing with—and which she announces to her readers quite directly via an epigraph about how a massive bell, too heavy to swing, can be set ringing by the tiny vibrations of a flute played beneath it—about the ways one character’s tiny action will ripple out and set all sorts of momentous events in motion for other characters. A busybody aunt makes a pointed comment to her niece, and next thing you know, an ambitious young doctor is engaged and racking up furniture debts, and his whole life trajectory is altered. A scoundrel picks up a fallen slip of paper, and suddenly a self-satisfied banker’s life begins to unravel, altering yet more trajectories. A goofball uncle issues an invitation, and whoosh! A codicil, a sudden death, a series of lives forever changed.

   
   All novels work this way, to some degree; but Eliot deliberately calls our attention to the dominoes knocking each other over all the way down the line. In the same chapter as that flute-and-bell epigraph, she says:

   It was not more possible to find social isolation in that town than elsewhere, and two people persistently flirting could by no means escape from ‘the various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which things severally go on.’ (Middlemarch, chapter 31)

   The “various entanglements” quote is from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, a first-century Roman poem that describes the origins of matter as a “state of discord” that led to all the atoms in the universe “joining battle, disordered their interspaces, passages, connexions, weights, blows, clashings, motions, because by reason of their unlike forms and varied shapes they could not all remain thus joined together nor fall into mutually harmonious motions" (H.A.J. Munro’s translation, this time).
   
   I mean, it’s just delicious. Forget dominoes: it’s atoms joining battle! You sense Eliot finding it all so interesting (and not a little amusing)—the inevitability of neighbors careening into each other quite by accident, sending each other spinning in chaotic orbits by chance remarks. Like—not even actions, always; just remarks! Most of the time, the characters have no idea these stray comments have had any impact at all, let alone that they’ve dramatically altered the fate of someone (or many someones) across town.
   
   So, yeah, obsessed.
   

   
   

2. Next enthusiasm: Tudor England. Because of

   Simon Haisell
   ’s absolutely incredible Cromwell trilogy readalong at
   Footnotes and Tangents
   . We’re nearing the end of the first book, Wolf Hall, and last week I couldn’t put it down, had to read to the end (the gulping plot-read). And then I couldn’t help but to flip back to earlier parts, reading, remembering, catching hold of symbols and ominous bits of foreshadowing. This readalong is the subject of more than one meaty but unfinished post in my drafts folder. There’s too much meat! I fill up page after page in my notebook (see below). I begin stitching notes together into essays, but essay-sewing is a slow business, and meanwhile I keep on reading: more notes, more ideas to stitch.
   
   I’m running into the same problem with Simon’s War and Peace readalong. We read a chapter a day. There’s a daily chat thread. Simon’s weekly summary/context/analysis posts are so rich they ought to be collected into a book of their own.
   
   And yes: it’s a bit ridiculous that I’m reading these THREE massive novels all at once. Four, if you count (and you should absolutely count) the Odyssey readaloud I’m doing with Huck and Rilla. (Emily Wilson translation. They are enjoying it to pieces. I’m so pleased.) Then again, studying four fabulous novels at once was pretty much my life as an English major, back in the day. Why not now?
   

3. Enthusiasm the Third: the Wars of the Roses. Because of course! A desire to better understand some of Henry VIII’s political rivals (as touched on in Wolf Hall) sent me down the York-Lancaster rabbit hole this week, and you know how it is with history—the farther you go, the farther there is to go. So many tunnels branching off the main one. After a while, you’re lost, and you remember there is no main one.
   
   Grappling with the key players from George VI to Henry Tudor put me in the mood to re-read Josephine Tey’s Daughter of Time again—a riveting 1951 detective novel that makes that case that Richard III wasn’t the monster Tudor historians (not to mention Shakespeare) made him out to be. It’s been, gosh, ten years or so since my last read? I enjoyed it even more this time around, having a lot more context for the major players. I’ve been humming the Horrible Histories Monarchs song on repeat. Do you know it? Oversimplified but useful!

4. Neverending enthusiasm: notebooks. Spending so much time in my own (see above) put me in the mood to revisit a favorite

   Noted
   post about Jillian Hess’s favorite Substack notebook-sharers.

   P.S. Six of My Favorite Notebooks on Substack

   One of the posts Jillian discusses is

   Katherine May
   ’s “How to Keep a Writer’s Notebook.” I loved this look at her process, which has a lot in common with mine.

   “In my view, a good notebook should be at best partially legible - that’s what creates its mystique. It should actively repel the casual viewer, and exude a feral air that unsettles intruders. It should be a disorderly space, defiant of bourgeois convention; a rowdy heath instead of a tidy garden. Its dark magic lies in a series of collisions, the juxtaposition of thoughts that, in any ordinary space, would not go together. The result should be an unruly object, defying polite society.”

   Disorderly, unruly, feral, full of collisions: yes. Over the years I’ve developed elaborate systems to help me venture through the brambly thicket of my own notes. Katherine’s practice is to write on the right-hand pages the first time through, leaving the left-hand page open for later visits and commentary. I prefer to fill up both sides, returning with a new color of ink next time I chop my way through.
   
   I leave wide margins and use Prismacolor pencils to mark anything I might want to pull out into a more developed piece of writing. I doodle everywhere. I write sideways up the page. The messier the page, the more developed the material.
   

   

   My notebook of choice is a Leuchtturm 1917 A5 dotted—the original 80gsm paper, not the newer 120gsm, which I haven’t tried and don’t really want to, because it’s more expensive. Suppose I like it better? That would be awful. The 80gsm holds up fine to fountain pens. There’s some ghosting, but I don’t mind that, as long as I fill up the other side of the page. I like the weight of the hardcover A5: it fits on my knees just right and the cover makes a firm surface beneath the paper.
   
   For weeks I’ll be in a felt-tip mood (Papermate Flair: old school), and then suddenly the wind will change and I’m back in love with my fountain pens (current favorite: Pilot Prera stub nib). Black ink for new notes and then on later passes, whatever is in my other pen. Most often a shade of blue-green. Right now: Iroshizuku Yama-budo, a lovely raspberry color.
   

5. Enthusiasm the last but by no means least: my garden! Today is (she writes ever so casually, while mentally squealing with glee) the one-year anniversary of the day we bought this house. I can hardly believe it. We didn’t move in until late May, but the keys changed hands on this date. Apple trees in blossom, forsythia and cherry trees all leafed out. A year later, there are the tulips I planted in fall, and several native shrubs beginning to look promising. The crows know us. I’ve dug an asparagus bed. About three years from now, I imagine Harvested my own asparagus!!!!1! will top my list of enthusiams.