Status Updates From William: An Englishman

Guy who considers himself a “history expert” but gets all his knowledge from long form ancient history podcasts and refuses, even at gunpoint, even for money, to even leisurely meander through a book on any of the subjects they’re supposedly “really into”.

Again, Cicely with the logo three pointer, like from way downtown bang with all this predicting-the-future stuff.

This is a book about the alt right pipeline I just can’t prove it. Cicely Hamilton saw the future.

Breathtaking stuff. If you go into this book knowing absolutely nothing, it will annihilate you.

People don’t talk enough about the happy married suffragette socialist couple ➡️ prisoners of war pipeline these days

*frantically writing down “Never go on a honeymoon to Belgium, under any circumstances, even if your older friend from DSA meetings offers you her pastoral spare cottage, equipped with a portly Flemish housemaid and a spry Dinantais farmboy porter; it doesn’t matter how nice it seems; war is inevitable, imminent, and unforgiving; you will have a bad time” in my VERY IMPORTANT REMINDERS notebook*

Masterful stuff, the 45-or-so pages of setup in this book, and the turn it’s taken since then. Mirrors Europe itself: glassy-eyed indifference, simpletonnish ignorance, smile-smacked alwaysness, until suddenly, all at once, the cleave of battle, the crack shot of war.

Or sth like that

😰😰😰

This book is no longer a walk through a garden.

The garden is burned. The lilacs are blackened.

Jesus.

So far this book is like going on a walk with a very funny woman in a very funny dress telling you a wonderful new plant she’s growing in her garden, and the specific kind of topsoil she had mail ordered through a Home Living catalog and delivered all the way from the Vesuvian region of Italy. (complimentary)

I was a little confused when we started out with a story from a famously feminist publisher called “William - An EnglishMAN” but now I have understood that the vibes are that William is actually a huge moron idiot and that he’s representative of a certain type of EnglishMAN of the time and now the book is really hitting.

Second page, where she describes William as a momma’s boy who nobody at the office likes, and how they think he’s a fuckin square, and that there’s “a plan afoot” to go out with him and get him drunk, but that it never turned into anything bc none of them cared enough to “dedicate an evening to the job.”

That’s good shit