The Wikipedia twitter account has started posting awesome niche articles, almost like they know I'm watching. I can't resist a quick post about one from today.
This glorious Wes Anderson movie event took place in the middle of nowhere in 1896. The details are too perfect:
A railway baron who was literally called Crush decided to hold a jolly, educational display in which he would crash two trains into each other as fast as possible. In response to this promise of true art, 40,000 people trekked into the desert to bear witness. The trains were smashed together, and the resulting blast killed a number of onlookers and injured several more.
A parable of humanity. A manifestation of pure irony. A fascinating historical insight. Today we have Michael Bay, but in the old days they had to pay - in blood, dammit - for their big pointless explosions.
But as ever, it's not the story itself that's my favourite part. It's the Wikipedia article. For starters, the opening is a masterclass in understated, Game-of-Thrones-style lulling into a false sense of security. The small detail of the gory denouement is relegated to one short sentence in the introduction (prefaced by the wonderfully deadpan "unexpectedly..."), and another even shorter one lost in the body of the article. The rest of the content entirely relates to details other than the fact that people died after willingly attending a literal train wreck.
We learn, for example, that the stunt was so well attended that the site was considered a temporary "city" with the second greatest population in the state. We learn the colours and makes of the trains involved, and that their crews had to be on board at the start to get them going, before leaping from the moving engines. We learn how high the enormous chunks of cast iron debris were forced into the air by the explosion ("hundreds of feet"). We learn which episode of the History Channel covered this breathtaking chapter in the history of human folly. We learn quite a lot about Scott Joplin's composition that commemorated the event.
We even learn this magnificent tidbit, which I think shines a light on today's american politics:
Crush was immediately fired from the Katy railroad. In light of a lack of negative publicity, however, he was rehired the next day
But at no point does the article dwell on the thought processes or chain of decisions that lead to, and apologies if I'm repeating myself here, a huge number of people thinking it would be a good idea to crash two pressurised steam engines together at high speed in close proximity to spectators.
After much soul searching, I'm finally ready to write something on the topic of the democratic primary - one of the most fascinating and important culture struggles of our day.
Here's the first thing I want to say: it depends a lot on how you think we can achieve gender equality. Everyone wants this, but there are different views on how to get it. For example, here is a fairly mainstream view:
The government and major cultural institutions should make a big effort to throw off gendered norms and preconceptions of the past and thus work towards a world in which women are treated as people and no different from men.
Here is my view:
Men should be banned from running for President.
Men should be banned from being CEOs and directing movies.
Men should be forced to say the words "I'm so so sorry for the patriarchy" once per hour.
In fact, for the next generation or so, men should be forced to live alone in glass cages with nothing but a daily supply of bread and water, wearing collars that give them an electric shock if they fail to intone the ritual apology at the appropriate time.
You think I'm joking. You think these ideas are extreme. You're wrong - these ideas are MILD. You have to consider the context. Women have been brutally oppressed for a hundred thousand years. All I'm asking for is that men sacrifice one generation - a mere speck in comparison! Plus they get to live, albeit naked and writhing in the apology torture cells, safe in the knowledge that although their lives are forfeit, at least their children will get to grow up in a world free from inequality. That's a luxury no woman has EVER had.
So...that's my view on how to achieve justice. But I'm a pragmatist. I realise that while my views are reasonable and restrained, others view them as fringe. No presidential candidate is going to run on a platform of dystopian patriarchy reparations, so I'm going to have to compromise.
What are my alternatives? I have Bernie Sanders, who is the first successful politician of recent decades to actually suggest some good ways to run the country a man, and I have Hilary Clinton, who is an extraordinary example of female strength in a system where everything is stacked against her a woman.
Other teensy factors in my decision:
Bernie is more radical and has better ideas for making a positive difference although...
The powers of the President are super limited.
Bernie is a man.
Bernie is more likely to lose to a Prince of Darkness Republican. And his presidency would ensure the Spawn of the Netherworld Republicans keep Congress for another 8 years.
The idea of another old white man winning enrages me so much that I want to pull my corneas off.
Everything about the response to Hilary's success, the loathing of her out of all proportion to her faults, confirms the fact that the system needs to change and change big.
Bernie is a man.
Perhaps these points make you think that I like Hilary simply for being a woman. I am happy to confirm this is the case. I am FLABBERGASTED that it wouldn't be the case for everyone.
Is it super stupid and patronising and arguably counter-productive to vote for someone because of their gender? YES.
But this is the person I am: a person so rabid that I would do anything to have a female President. It's the person that a lifetime of living in a horrendously unequal world has made me. The kind of person that I believe is the only reasonable response to the aforementioned hundred thousand years of mind-boggling oppression of half the goddam species.
I would commit the cliche of comparing it to the Third Reich, except for the fact that the patriarchy utterly DWARFS the Third Reich.
I read a really great piece recently that argued that many older feminists feel that Hilary is "entitled" to the Presidency because they've waited so long for it. It said that Bernie's young feminist supporters don't owe Hilary or the old feminists anything.
But for me, Hilary is entitled to the Presidency not because she's worked for it all her life - having to play the horrible game and be way better at it in order to get anywhere - but because she happens to be the only woman running. HUMANITY is entitled to a female president, not just Hilary or older feminists. Humanity is CRAZY ENTITLED. And it's lucky that Hilary is there to fulfil that entitlement.
The left currently adores Bernie for being radical. But Bernie thinks small. Here's the radical scale:
Seriously. Unless I'm wrong, and I am never wrong, they are headed dead into the fire swamp gender equality is THE biggest issue of our times. It ties into every important cultural shift that we need to achieve if we're going to have an awesome society in the future. Having a female President can do so much more good than any well-intentioned candidate ever could. And conversely, NOT having ever had a female President - in 2020 for christ's sake! - is just incredibly harmful towards overall progress.
Joy will be the second greatest emotion I feel when Hilary becomes President. Relief will be the greatest.
The Force Awakens' title seems to imply that the Force is something new in the galaxy. But when you wake up, you tend not to be particularly different from when you went to bed. This is a short review with maximum spoilers.
All I can say is that if they had done to any of my fandoms what they did to Star Wars in Episode VII, I'd be cross. I don't think it's a particularly worse film than any of the previous 6, although it does have massive dramatic flaws, but rather for me the huge glaring issue is that it's so similar to them, or at least to Episodes IV through VI. To the point where it's essentially a remake of the original trilogy.
Said trilogy famously made free use of ancient story structures and archetypes. A pure-hearted Chosen One, who leaves their unremarkable home and learns to embrace and control their high-stakes destiny during a series of ever grander adventures guided by characters good and evil. It's the same structure used in hundreds of films. But each one recreates the hero's journey in a particular way, with its own unique take on monomythological tropes. So why did Episode VII feel the need to deploy these tropes in exactly the same way as its predecessors from 40 years ago?
Let us review. For each point below, see if you can tell whether it's referring to the original trilogy or Episode VII:
Villains:
-Main force-wielding villain, wears all black, sinister mask/voice distortion, close family ties to Good characters, was seduced by dark side and is basically totally evil but has some residual goodness. First showed evil by killing younglings.
-Old/withered/white-faced master villain who lurks in shadows, gives instructions via hologram
-Slightly more mundane British Nazi-style villain who is nominally in command of fleet but basically takes orders from villain one
-They operate out of an enormous spherical planet-destroying weapon, protected by shields the resistance can’t penetrate and featuring one single weak spot for easy detonation
-use stormtroopers and TIE-fighters as endless cannon fodder
Good Guys:
-Are rebels, operate out of ramshackle base using desperate guerrilla tactics against more powerful foe
-Are not morally compromised in any way. Unambiguously good.
-Film opens on brave resistance/rebel fighter being captured by villains, but not before s/he sends trusted (and cute) little droid off with Vital Information.
-Hero - grows up scratching a meagre living on desert planet not knowing real parents
-Accidentally comes across/rescues the droid.
-Various action sequences as they attempt to take the Vital Information back to Good Guy HQ
-is mentored by an older fellow who was in the wars/had his heyday back in the previous trilogy
-this older fellow dispenses wise advice and then sacrifices himself, without putting up a fight, to the main villain (who he has a long history with) at a climactic moment near the end
-on the way to find Good Guy HQ, hero encounters:
-roguish/comic/loveable guy in a leather jacket who isn’t technically resistance but is clearly a Good Guy despite past behaviour
-and: stops at a space canteen, where violence eventually ensues
-and: gradually learns that s/he has a powerful connection to the Force; slowly begins to master it
-final showdown with villain ends without clear victory/defeat, paving way for sequel
-on finally reaching Good Guy HQ, heroes go into Act 3 with plan to destroy planet-killing spherical weapon by sending a small team to take down the shields and then hit the weak spot with X-wings. A stressed admiral akbar is there for some reason but no one cares about him.
Also occurring:
-Young beautiful female captured by villains and held on death star; other heroes mount rescue by basically creeping through corridors and shooting loads of stormtroopers
-escape via space hangar
-At one point, heroes are completely cornered/at mercy of a group of minor bad guys, only to have them eaten by giant monsters with teeth/tentacles
-There’s a little shrivelled old alien who is incredibly wise and knows all about the force/the history of the force, guiding the hero towards what s/he Must Do
-the good guys are looking for the last jedi, who has retreated to some remote hiding place that nobody knows: only the Chosen One is able to find them
-The millennium falcon negotiates improbably tight spaces at high speed and appears indestructible, despite being constantly referred to as a piece of junk
A couple of these duplications are fairly minor, like the last one. But most of them are central plot points, structural cornerstones or character traits and motivations, things that are absolutely key to how the story functions and how the audience experiences its drama.
I say again: Episode VII is not a sequel but a remake. It feels like the filmmakers were so terrified about another phantom menace-style backlash that they simply refused to deviate in any respect from the original formula. I was excited in the run up to the film, because I assumed that we would finally get a new story from a decent story-teller set in a universe full of telekinetics - a perfect recipe for success in my book. I was worried that the story we got might turn out to be bad or boring, but it never crossed my mind that we would simply get A New Hope with names swapped around. And remember, A New Hope was already super-derivative.
Most of the reviews of The Force Awakens have been positive, but even among those who disliked the film, complaints have (with good reason) centred around about the very poorly-drawn characters, unearned dramatic beats, relentless/unstructured pacing and - inevitably - the boundless plotholes. In contrast, I'm stunned that so few have focused on the fact that the whole thing is just one giant re-hash.
This article should probably start in the same way as the Wikipedia page, whose first sentence I reproduce here in all its glory:
Cornealious Michael "Mike" Anderson III (born c. 1977) is an American convict whose case became nationally known when it was discovered (when he was due to be released) that, due to a clerical error, he was never imprisoned.
This was a big story in 2013 and 2014, although I never heard it at the time. But despite being self-evidently remarkable, I am of course less interested in the story itself and more in its chronicling by Wikipedia.
The gist is this: our man Cornealious, apparently the third of his great name, robbed a Burger King at gunpoint in August 1999, and in March 2000, he was sentenced to 13 years behind bars. He was released on bail during an appeal, but when this was rejected, the erstwhile Missouri Department of Corrections made no effort to return him to its custody, evidently burdened by the belief that he was already in it. Cornealious proceeded to live out a relatively happy and peaceable 13 years, which included getting married and founding his own company. In another standout sentence, Wikipedia states: "He registered his business, he voted, he renewed his driver's licence all using his full name and address."
No one noticed until 2013, when, as I like to imagine it, a bored guard turned up at an empty cell, looking at his clipboard and muttering if anyone had seen Anderson.
Wikipedia compares the case to that of Rene Lima-Marin, also convicted of armed robbery in 2000, this time in Colorado. Rene was sentenced to 98 years behind bars (justice!) but was erroneously released after a mere 8, without anyone - even Rene - realising that this was 9 decades early. "He became active in his church, married his former girlfriend, helped raise her son, and had another son with her." In a lovely, if suspicious, turn out for the books, Rene and Cornealious were represented by the same lawyer.
Now, the article spends more than 2,300 words describing these two cases, along with some of the "controversy" that they provoked in the media - this alone surely represents overzealous attention to detail for what is essentially a minor, if novel and attention-grabbing, moment in US legal history. But what I feel is really outstanding is the further 800 words dedicated to a section titled, drily, "Analysis".
The Analysis reads like an undergraduate law school assignment, comparing and contrasting several legal authorities (fully referenced, with citations for each publication) and their takes on what the whole kerfuffle says about the US justice system. Of particular note is the fact that Cornealious became - in the time he spent not in prison - by all accounts a fully reformed and upstanding member of society. As the judge finally put it in 2014: "Go home to your family, Mr. Anderson, and continue to be a good father, a good husband, a good taxpayer... Good luck to you."
This is to be contrasted - as the wiki-academics do at length - with the penal system as a whole, which has a famously poor record when it comes to reforming inmates. Consider the pros and cons weighed in this short, but thoughtful, passage:
Two thirds of people released from prison reoffend and often by committing a more serious crime. Instead of rehabilitating, prisons train people to be more violent.[29] According to Zeman, the failure to rehabilitate is a threat to society, but that it is a hard sell to convince those who focus on incarceration as punishment that incarceration should focus on rehabilitation.[29] According to Gilligan, allowing prisoners access to education and obtaining a college degree is the only program that has ever been shown effective in reducing recidivism.[29] However, such education programs are either viewed as too lenient or they are ineffectual in most prisons in the United States.[29]
Now, you or I might wonder what the minutiae of different expert opinions on modern recidivism has to do with a brief media sensation in 2013, but Wikipedia appears undaunted as it ploughs on for several lengthy paragraphs. This is why I love this website. The piece goes on to thoroughly explore the ideas of a man named Jayadev, who eventually makes Cornealious more or less a poster child for penal reform, citing the ludicrous costs of incarceration, the likelihood of re-offence and the problem of mandatory sentencing.
So if you ever thought Wikipedia was a simple one-stop shop for basic facts about stuff, remember Cornealious III.
OK, bear with. I'm going to attempt a short review of the new Pixar film, the Good Dinosaur, onto which I will then try to shoehorn such topics as: Batman, Dylan Thomas, Ernest Hemingway, Woody Allen, Arya Stark and the quest for immortality. But mainly it's about death. Spoilers follow.
I liked the film. It's a fairly simple Western for kids with a few good gags, even if it leans little heavily on the sentimentality. But the story is great. Pixar didn't do a film last year - a traumatic absence - but they made up for it this year with two films that approach storytelling in what to me feels like an exciting new way. Like Inside Out, the Good Dinosaur sees our hero plunged against his will into a fantastical landscape through which he must make his way home, learning much about himself and growing as a character as a result of his experiences along the way.
This is the hero's journey structure, used in virtually every great Disney film since Chris Vogler famously introduced it to the studio in 1985. In its particular incarnation in children's animations, the hero's journey has developed certain moral overtones (not that these are unique to Disney of course), which can be simplified as: the character has a Defect, and over the course of the Journey, it is Rectified.
Simba is childish and burdened with guilt; at the end of the film he is wise and has Remembered who he Is. Pocahontas doesn't know which path to take; she finds it as a peace-maker. Mulan can't seem to be a proper woman; she learns that proper womanhood lies in saving the Empire, sorry, I mean bravery and doing the Right Thing. Aladdin hates his scavenging street-rat status; eventually he uses honesty to earn the love of a Princess. Quasimodo is jealous of the freedom of others; by the end he is, almost manically, pushing the love of his life into the arms of another.
In Inside Out, Joy's problem is that Riley is sad, and in the Good Dinosaur, Arlo is afraid. But here's where things are slightly novel: the solution isn't to extinguish sadness or fear, but to find these "negative" emotions' utility. Joy realises that Riley needs to be able to feel sadness to grow as a person, and Arlo realises, in the words of the daddy Rex, "If you ain't scared, you ain't alive". Inside Out definitely makes this point more clearly, because Arlo has to overcome his fear at key moments, but the idea is still there and it's a good one to explore.
It's difficult for most of us in life to attempt a proper hero's journey where we completely change ourselves and purge our defects - for most people, it's more realistic to come to terms with them, and often, they're important to hold on to, because they help us in ways we might forget about. It's a profound, difficult and exciting idea, and it speaks to Pixar's immense creative talent that they are willing to pioneer it.
The point about fear is actually something that I've thought quite a lot about in the past. It was best brought home to me in one particular line from the Good Dinosaur, crowbarred though it may have been. The crazed, murderous pterodactyl Thunderclap attacks his foes by proclaiming the source of his power: "I have seen the eye of the Storm and I forgot what fear is!"
Now, Thunderclap is an insane cargo cult leader in a movie for infants, but I think his character really gets to the nub of what's so damaging about fanatical belief in anything. Cults and religions (wherever you draw the line between the two) are pretty much targeted precisely at people's fear. They offer the ability to remove your fear (of death, of being alone, of whatever) and replace it with an unthinking - but shared, communal - dogma. Dogma is something which you can trust and defend, whatever happens. You never need to worry again. But it's when you lose the ability to fear that you gain the ability to become a fanatic. In other words, fear is necessary for our sanity, not something to be driven out or overcome.
This brings me onto my next point (although, let's be honest, when is it ever not my next point?) - my crippling fear of death. As often as possible, I like to rewatch my favourite scene from Midnight in Paris:
I don't want to dive into the thorny topic of Hemingway's sanity, but in my view you've got to be completely barmy not to fear death. By comparison to his passionate denial of fear, the archetypal New Yorker neuroticism looks positively well adjusted, but it is the former that is held up as virtuous and manly. Whenever a thing's primary recommendation is that mainstream masculinity approves of it, you know there's a strong chance it's nonsense.
Being as obsessed with the fear of death as Mr Allen, it's something that I've written about before in the context of Chris Nolan's final Batman movie, the Dark Knight Rises. In that film, Batman is completely willing to lay down his life to protect his city, but what is really required of him is something much more challenging: to find the will not to die, but to live. To regain a fear of death. Like the Good Dinosaur, what the Dark Knight Rises shows so well is that fear can be a strength; it's something that can make life so much more worth living.
That's why I find it so difficult to understand the (very common) position that immortality should be avoided. Medical science has hinted at the possibility that, at some point in the next century, perhaps, ageing can be slowed and stopped. Yet some of my earliest memories involve being taught, earnestly, that death is not something to fear, that you can only achieve peace and happiness in life if you come to terms with the inevitability of its end. Many "wise" and "zen" philosophies (and of course religions) are built on this principle. But for the person who is happy to die, what kind of value can be placed on living?!
That's why I'd like to end this exceptionally strange monologue with a call to arms in support of research towards longevity and, hopefully immortality. Like my other hero, Game of Thrones' Arya, the correct response to death ought to be "not today!" We have the radical potential - just maybe - to be the first generation to truly embrace fear, embrace life, and to finally rage with some effectiveness against the dying of the light. And that should be a cause for hope.
For some reason, although I like to think I have a wide range of interests, most of the articles on Wikipedia that really get me are historical. Maybe history is particularly suited to in-depth but not over-complex summaries in encyclopaedic style, relative to other subjects. I remember loving my history teacher at primary school because he literally just treated every class as a storytelling session. It was amazing.
The best bits of historical stories - like all stories - are the bits that you can relate to. When you manage to understand at some deep level that the people who went through the things being described weren't a special breed of cultural alien but basically normal humans like you and me. My very favourite example of this is the utterly brilliant and remarkably moving Michael Wood documentary bluntly titled the Story of England. All of history told through the archaeological and other records of a single town in Leicestershire.
The above is a preamble to today's Wikipedia article: Smithfield, London. I don't know about you, but I hardly ever go to Smithfield. It's a bit too close to the City to be something I'm ever likely to stumble across. And I have all my (non-existent) meat requirements met by Tesco Express. So in the spirit of inquiry, I ventured down there after reading the Wikipedia article and had a look. It was weird but strangely thrilling to find myself a tourist in my own city. I felt suddenly furtive, like I was trespassing and someone was sure to unmask me.
The first thing it says in the Smithfield article is that the name is derived from "Smooth Field". Given that this naming ostensibly occurred over a thousand years ago, many centuries before modern English existed, I find such a derivation somewhat suspect, and there is a pleasing lack of citations. The article itself even uses an image from the 16th century where the site is clearly marked "Schmyt Fyeld".
In any event, it is clear that fields were involved and that London was once incredibly - hilariously - tiny. I take an immense amount of pleasure in the mindblowing-ness of this idea: that a locality which today might as well mark the epicentre of one of the planet's largest and densest urban sprawls was once a grassy field populated by a few intermittent cows.
Basically, in the old days, Britain's capital was about the size of a shopping mall, surrounded on all sides by featureless pastures.
Empires have risen and fallen. Kings have come and gone. God himself has been killed. Humanity has progressed in countless ways. And a great big bloody metropolis has slowly grown around it, but in all that time - every single day, more or less - Smithfield has facilitated the purchase of freshly culled animal flesh.
The Market itself is the subject of the latter half of the (fairly long) Wikipedia article, such is its fascination. There is this enigmatic quote from 1178, describing Smithfield as, once again:
"a smooth field where every Friday there is a celebrated rendezvous of fine horses to be traded, and in another quarter are placed vendibles of the peasant, swine with their deep flanks, and cows and oxen of immense bulk."
Now, is that a typo for "pheasant"? If not, surely it should be followed by a colon, not a comma, unless the aristocracy of the time really was as joyously evil/cannibalistic as we like to think.
The maintenance of a meat market for a thousand years despite epic changes in urban development and culture was, as you might imagine, no easy task. By the Victorian era, 220 thousand cows and 1.5 million sheep per year were "violently forced into an area of five acres, in the very heart of London, through its narrowest and most crowded thoroughfares". Wikipedia rates the "hygienic conditions" as "extremely poor", and notes that they "started to raise major concerns".
Despite our authors' mild tone, these concerns were not taken lightly by people at the time, as well can be believed for those living in a city through which vast numbers of filthy beasts daily trudged towards a grisly fate. There's a delightfully Brooker-esque quote from a contemporary book that appears to have been titled by a Wikipedia editor, Suggestions for the Improvement of Our Towns and Houses:
"Of all the horrid abominations with which London has been cursed, there is not one that can come up to that disgusting place, West Smithfield Market, for cruelty, filth, effluvia, pestilence, impiety, horrid language, danger, disgusting and shuddering sights, and every obnoxious item that can be imagined; and this abomination is suffered to continue year after year, from generation to generation, in the very heart of the most Christian and most polished city in the world."
I always like a good use of "horrid".
By the second half of the 19th century, Parliament finally got involved, putting the city out of its misery and banishing the cattle market to distant, rural Islington. Smithfield was rebuilt as a new market where animals were typically deceased before arrival. Hence the overly grandiose, wrought iron affair you see today. The construction of the new Smithfield coincided with that of one of London's earliest underground railway lines, allowing faster transit of meats to the cold stores.
One such subterranean store was used for the experiments of a real life mad scientist during WWII (an attempt to create a brand new material for floating oceanic airstrips), in another snapshot of Smithfield's interaction with major events in British history.
Considering its primary commercial purpose in life, Smithfield as a London landmark has had an extraordinary number of these interactions. Wikipedia divides its more general history into "Religious" and "Civil" subsections.
Turns out, something about the stench of dying animals is attractive to God after all, as Smithfield appears to be the centre of London's religious life - at least from a casual reading of Wikipedia. The most famous institution here is of course St Bartholomew's, now better known as a hospital*, but still also at least two Smithfield churches.
The oldest of them was founded in the gloriously Fibonaccian year of 1123, as a favour from Henry I to a priest who had apparently saved his life. It must have been a lovely proposition: a nice little priory in a great big field right on the edge of town. Now you can barely see it as it's sandwiched between a wall built by a later King Henry and a massive modern hospital, but if you walk purposefully past the security guards, as I found the other night, it's still there and still being used at 8pm on a weekday. Although not everything about the church has survived: you ever heard of the Bartholomew Fair? Me neither. It was just a major London event for SEVEN HUNDRED YEARS until it was deemed indecent by the bloody Victorians.
Other religious institutions at Smithfield include the Carthusian Charterhouse - founded in 1371, although the infamous boarding school part moved to Surrey in 1872. In the 1500s, it was monks from Charterhouse who attempted to reason with the famously phlegmatic Thomas Cromwell when he first persuaded Henry VIII to enact sweeping religious renovations that decimated most of the Smithfield churches. Wikipedia tells it straight as ever:
This resulted in their being flung into the Tower of London, and on 4 May 1535, they were taken to Tyburn and hanged — becoming the first Catholicmartyrs of the Reformation.
Such fun. Speaking of which, my favourite part of the whole Wikipedia article is the section on civil history. Again, its open position on outskirts of town made Smithfield an ideal site for all kinds of amazing public spectacles. But mostly, it "has borne witness to many bloody executions of heretics and political rebels over the centuries" as the article states at the outset. I like to think of it as the place you'd go, as a bored peasant, for something like the opening scene of the John Landis film Burke and Hare:
Smithfield "bore witness" to some of the real greats: William Wallace's fictional cry of "FREEDOM!" would have been heard there, far from his bonnie home, while the leader of the momentous 14th century Peasant's Revolt, Wat Tyler, also met his demise on the field at the hands of the Lord Mayor, in the spirit of Boris-like mucking-in. Tyler hadn't in fact come for an execution but a parlay, which went badly south when he started saying rude things about King Richard.
It wasn't just gruesome capital punishment that you could find at Smithfield back in the day (if William Wallace's intestines weren't bed enough, Queen Mary also hosted some of her well-known bonfires at Smithfield, while "swindlers and coin forgers" were apparently boiled to death in oil. It all went downhill when we started getting soft on petty crime, I'm telling you.) There were also proper chivalric tournaments. One particularly extravagant joust in 1390 was commanded by Richard II, not long after dealing with the revolting peasants, and was supervised by one Geoffrey Chaucer in his lesser known day job as an event organiser (actually he was a clerk to the King, which I also didn't know).
So Smithfield has seen it all. But think of all those who've seen Smithfield. All those ordinary Londoners over all those centuries, who've trod those cobbles/open grassland, smelled the blood and shit and religious incense, heard the dying cries of man and beast alike, and witnessed almost every major event to have befallen this magnificent, godforsaken city.
The article ends by noting the Museum of London's planned move to the part of the market that is currently unoccupied. It's a strange idea, but if any London landmark deserves recognition for its historical adventures, surely this is it.
*The hospital is in fact equally ancient - although in the 14th century a large part of it was used, even more hygienically than the livestock slaughter, as a mass grave for plague victims.
Today we consider the glorious wikipedia page Hypatia. Hypatia is quite a nice name, but surprisingly, according to the disambiguation, there has only been one other famous person called Hypatia in history - a pornographic actor - and even then it was a stage name. The name is derived from the Greek for "highest" or "supreme", which to me makes it sound even more awesome, but perhaps parents have avoided it for reasons of hubris.
Hypatia was a badass philosopher chick from Alexandria in the 5th century AD. By "philosopher", I of course mean "general academic", best known for her mathematics. In Roman times everyone was a renaissance man, although I suppose it would be more accurate to call them simply naissance.
What's incredible about the wikipedia page for Hypatia is its sense of proportion. Her life and work are of apparently trivial consequence compared to the authors' all-consuming obsession with one particular event: her death.
Don't believe me? Here is the section on the Hypatia page called "Life":
And here is the section called "Death":
Actually this is only part of it. Yeah, it's so long that even at maximum zoom-out, I still couldn't screenshot the whole thing. It's even got an illustration.
As a lifelong fan of morbidity, you can see why this page appealed. Sod the fact that Hypatia managed to become a female director of a major academic institution of the hypermasculine classical world (the Platonist school of Alexandria), as well as the leading lecturer, thinker and possibly political advisor in the city. As one of the first women in history to be recognised for her academic greatness, we should be completely in awe of her gumption and strength of character, not just her scholarly prowess.
Unfortunately, this seems to have passed most historians - and writers of crowdsourced encyclopaedias - by. While we have several detailed sources documenting her demise, it feels like nobody has wanted to talk about her actual life: a patriarchal conspiracy of epic proportions. If she'd been a dude, we'd know what she liked to eat for breakfast, but as a woman we don't even have a clue when she was born. Wikipedia gives a 20-year window for her DOB. 20 years! Not a single one of Hypatia's writings, which by all accounts were extensive, has survived. To be fair, she did have the bad luck to live in a city famous for routinely having its libraries destroyed, but even so, one can't help but feel that archivists, and history in general, have had it out for her.
The one contemporary source that Wikipedia does quote about Hypatia's life is amazingly endearing, as well as effusive, describing her as *the* leading thinker of her time, a teacher to whom acolytes from around the world would flock. Further:
"On account of the self-possession and ease of manner which she had acquired in consequence of the cultivation of her mind, she not infrequently appeared in public in the presence of the magistrates. Neither did she feel abashed in going to an assembly of men. For all men on account of her extraordinary dignity and virtue admired her the more."
So the one person who actually knew Hypatia makes her out to be a feminist trailblazer on a magnificent scale. Still, even this dude, who went by the incredibly humble name of Socrates Scholasticus, only deigns to give Hypatia a paragraph, and if there was anyone else writing about her, wikipedia doesn't bother to mention them.
Contrast this to the attention lavished on her death. Suddenly wikipedia turns into a paragon of historiographical inquiry, comparing and contrasting the multiple sources that tell us about how Hypatia met her grisly end - with no clothes on!
I won't dignify this episode with a major summary, suffice to say she was murdered by Christian fanatics who had been riled by the city's political/religious machinations du jour, and happened to seize on her as a scapegoat. Depending on the account, she was either stripped naked, torn to pieces, and set on fire, or she was stripped naked, dragged through the streets until she died, and set on fire. The important thing is that she was naked when it happened. And then she was brutalised and burned.
This last detail has led some historians to describe her as effectively the first witch, which is kind of cool. The thinking goes: she was pagan, she worked with ancient knowledge that confused and scared contemporary laypeople, and she was burned by an enraged/illiterate Christian mob. She probably weighed the same as a duck too.
After "Death", the next longest section of Hypatia's wikipedia page concerns her legacy. History has fought over this woman for centuries, despite the complete lack of information about her. Some have wanted to show her as a noble and virtuous practitioner of science and reason, while others have tried to portray a scheming pagan who literally possessed, in the cliche of a 7th century biographer, "Satanic wiles". Unsurprisingly, the issue of her virginity has vexed many commentators. In any event, she has cropped up in literature and research much more regularly than might have been expected for someone about whose actual life and work history has cared so little. All the poor woman probably wanted was to get on with her research and lecturing. Those lesson plans don't write themselves.
