journaling

It's February and it's too cold to go outside. ( Read more... )

writing about Brexit from the other side of the Atlantic

One of the reasons why it took me several years to produce the followup to my 2015 yuletide TDiR fic -- in addition to computer-related mishaps -- was that, just as I'd finished my research and felt up-to-snuff on 1980s Welsh devolution politics, the Brexit referendum vote split the UK's political firmament. And, all of a sudden, writing about the adulthood of a contemporary son of Arthur felt different. Now that Brexit is imminent, of course, I'm right back to it. It really is peculiar, going head-down in the Matter of Britain while the last vengeance of Imperial madness threatens to wreck the islands.

I was thinking about how fitting it is, really, that Arthur is based on no real figure of history. A fictional king. Charlemagne was real, and so was Hector; but Camelot does not appear to have been a place. I'm interested in stories of history that have calcified into legend, but also really interested in pseudohistories that manage to gain almost-factual status. I was sure, as a kid, that there would be a historical Arthur, same as there was a historical Jesus. Turns out, he's more like Moses, leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt when according to archaeological records they were not enslaved there in large numbers to begin with.

Would it have been better, in a long view, to lay aside fantasies of a British uniter? Though I know my own independence politics have undergone a revision in the last five years; before, I always would have supported a body seeking independence, but after seeing the degree of Russian ratfucking involved in referendums in ie Catalonia I'm no longer sure it's in the best interests of the world for us to be subdividing.