Faith and Evolution and Judy (and Punch)

My favorite paragraph from the readers' debate in today's on-line Times about Evolution vs. Faith {http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/01/04/us/04evolve.html}:

"Religion isn't science. It is the belief in the unseen and untestable. Does evolution mean God doesn't exist? No. But God, as a hypothesis cannot be tested from personal experience. The assertion, "I have a personal relationship with God" doesn't wash. There is no way to determine whether that personal relationship is with the Almighty or with the Ever Hopeful/Needy Self. I once thought I had a personal relationship with God and, specifically Jesus. The sensation of that relationship was palpable. Then, one day, I was watching "A Star is Born" with Judy Garland. When she stood up at the end of the movie and said to the Hollywood crowd, "My name is Mrs. Norman Mane," I had an experience that was so close to my religious experience that I suddenly realized that I had no clue as to whether my religious experiences were, well, religious."

(The contributor is named Thurly. Thanks, Thurly! Judy forever! Art is religion!)

By the way: all the contributors, believers and otherwise, are pro-evolution -- but it IS the Times, and early in the morning - only 25 contributors so far. Wait till there are 400. Wait till the Bible Belt gets out of bed and starts reading. But who would want to read them all then?

I agreed with all the posters who said the problem was the lousiness of the educational system in this country coupled with the fact that people no longer read. My current reading is a terrific novel, Orhan Pamuk's My Name Is Red, about a society - Turkey in 1591 - where people are murdered by religious fanatics for deviating, artistically, from tradition. Or were there other reasons for the murder? Lust? Greed? Fear? Among the narrators are a corpse, a murderer, a woman in love, a Jewish go-between, a small boy named Orhan, several miniaturists, a dog in a storyteller's tale, a horse in a miniaturist's drawing, Death, Satan, a counterfeit gold coin and the color red. So much better than The Name of the Rose.

Pamuk rules, dudes, I mean, effendi. (No - that can't be true - or he wouldn't have been prosecuted under the anti-Turkishness paragraph of the constitution.)

P.S. I did not contribute to the NYTimes discussion. Gaea drew Ouranos from Chaos and they mated and had the Titans and the hundred-armed Giants ... Hesiod said it, I believe it, that settles it.

Bad dreams for the new year

I don't entirely rule out the influence of the smoked turkey I munched at midnight, but I had ominous bad dreams on New Year's Night. New Year's Eve I was mostly sleepless, wondering why I'd rejected the advances of the Russian (Seryozha) who wanted to come home with me from Ty's (ten years younger, looked ten years older - I blame cigarettes). But then I wouldn't have slept at all, because the presence of unfamiliar folk in my bed keeps me awake like nothing else, and I can't even turn on the light and read.

Anyway, the first part of this morning's dream was fun: attending a Handel opera, David Daniels playing Hercules (which opera was this? Perhaps Ercole sul Termodonte, or Hercules Among the Dinosaurs, Vivaldi score based on an old Steve Reeves script), and I had a complimentary press seat, and all was hunky-dory, except that they kept pausing the performance to reconfigure the bleacher seating, and the audience would patiently move around, and each time they did it, my seat was harder and harder to find, and I felt conspicuous, as if it were my fault that the performance was being delayed, and there was no sign of Mr. D!

But then I found myself in a lab with my beloved Dr. Ellen Gold, my oncologist, who cured me of lymphoma way back when (1997), who was doing some sort of routine exam, and I was fixating rather on her hair, as black as I remembered it but far longer and more exotic seeming (I've been reading too much poetic Orhan Pamuk fiction, eh?) , with spangly colors in it like a peacock's tail, and all this (perhaps she had removed it while she went to do some tests) in a blasé frame of mind until she returned with something or other, some removable body part, or some petri dish, or some X-ray, and said, "This isn't good."

She sounded so calm that I did not fluster. I asked, "Not good as in ... how?" And she said, glumly, "Very not good." I said, "It's back?" and she replied, "Yes, it's back." And we both knew, on the instant, that chemo would not work this time, that the cancer would kill me this time, that I had rolled the dice (or played the hand) and lost big-time. Did I still have time to visit St. Petersburg? Palermo? Isfahan? Havana? Did I still have time to get to 500 operas? (I'm up to 484.) Did I still have time to finish writing a book? Did I -- ?

"I don't know," she said. She sounded hopeless, as despairing as I felt. I certainly didn't blame her. If anything I felt lousy about letting her down. E muoio disperato.... No doubt that will come in time. But not yet. We were examining the bloody sample, whatever it was. It didn't look good. Even I could see that. Too depressed to ask for a second opinion, I took the easy way out - I woke up.

This would depress me but I'm too busy with various jobs to give it a thought. And Chris wants to haul me to Film Forum for a Joan Crawford film noir.

A Hanukkah Posting

This time of year makes me think back to perhaps my first encounter with religious history. Of course, there had been the unspoken rituals handed down in my family for at least a decade or two from which I had imbibed unexplicated lessons, but the first time it all came out in the open, as I recall it (or as my internal Talmudic fabulist scribe chooses to arrange it for maximum moral value), I was, at the age of seven or eight, given a book: The Story of Hanukkah.

Probably a publication of the Golden Books division of Simon & Schuster, source of much of my childhood entertainment (some of their executives were patients of my father's, I believe), it was a very large book with big illustrations and it told the story you all know: the Jews were conquered by nasty Greeks who ordered them to bow down to Greek idols; they resisted; they were oppressed; five brothers named Maccabee led a revolt; took the Temple; couldn't find enough consecrated oil for the proper ritual; a miracle occurred. This was followed by the menorah, the dreidel and other customs later spoofed on South Park. The Hanukkah Bush was not mentioned – just as well, since my parents had a Christmas Tree and called it that, and its colors and lights thrilled me from the first. I never questioned why my grandparents did not have such trees – they lived in Manhattan, in apartments; we lived in New Rochelle, in a house. People who lived in apartments did not have trees; people who lived in houses had children and trees. The logic was clear.

The book told a subtler story, or many stories. Who were these thriftless people with their Temple that didn't have storage space for more than one tiny bottle of oil? Who were the Greeks and what were they doing out of Greece? Who were those annoying kids willing to be put to death rather than pray to an idol, and why was it even an issue? Who were these rather ruthless Maccabees? (The later history of the dynasty was, mercifully, omitted: a bloody bunch.) Does the establishment of a holiday that is all about light, light returning ceremoniously, night by night, at precisely the Winter Solstice, not seem awfully pagan, awfully typical of earth-based rituals throughout the northern hemisphere? (It was ten years or more before I got around to asking that question.) Was the whole Hanukkah business, complete with bush and presents and carols (dear heavens! yes – even in high school choir – no doubt inevitable in so Jewish a suburb as New Rochelle), not a pasty me-too imitation of the great American consumerist Christmas?

My mother said this, early and often – she still does. When she was a child, Hanukkah was almost unheard of, and she had watched its growth and emulation of Currier & Ives custom with disquiet and contempt – but then, when she was a child, there had not been any recent attempt to wipe Judaism off the earth, and that event certainly had something to do with the revived and modernized, Second Coming as it were, of Hanukkah after the war.

So I got the book, and though puzzled, devoured it, especially noting the illustrations (which ancient Jewry so wisely forbade in their books): a bunch of muscular but slovenly men attacking a bunch of rather stiff centurion types, breaking into the Temple precincts, throwing down and demolishing statues of a rather pretty lady with a helmet on her head.

My response was instantaneous: Who was the pretty lady, and why would anyone break her statue? (Only much later did I discover that statues of her can be found all over New York – her family and friends too. I guess the Maccabees didn't get them all.)

Kiddie though I was, I had already been taken by my grandmothers, with great solemnity, in familial rite, to enormous, pervasively silent temple-type buildings filled with wonders and with echoes and with a great sense of awe and tradition. The Met Museum, for instance, was a palace and a temple, and there are lots of helmeted ladies there. (Also naughty pictures of ladies with nothing on at all, but I don't remember visiting those galleries. I wasn't much of one for painting till I was about 20, actually.) (There were also statues of men wearing nothing at all, and I knew I shouldn't look at certain parts of their bodies, but no doubt because of my childish lack of height, I did tend to stare. Being uncut, they didn't look at all like mine.)

Somehow I knew that it was wicked – wicked for those brutal men to knock down statues of that lovely lady. Somehow the book made me curious about her, and her rites, and the Greeks who loved her if not wisely perhaps too well. From my parents and grandparents, I had already imbibed the family religion: beautiful objects should be preserved and gazed at, appreciated and understood, shared with the world. Privately, of course, I wanted to keep them to myself – not the Met, which is a bit unwieldy, but I wanted the whole Cloisters all to myself, and maybe the Frick as well. But I didn't get them, either one, and regular access seemed the next best thing.

My family faith was in the works of human art – or so it seemed to me. The manifestations of all men and women, the arts that inspire and never inflict harm, the statues and buildings and paintings and (later) books and songs and dramas, that we all of us share, that cannot replace themselves and depend on us for their creation and preservation and glory: worshipful as evidence of the glory of human mind and skill, ranking us with the creation of nature itself (if it was created). Nature tends to have better taste, less subject to fashion. That is how one knows it is above art. But by my personal faith, it is possible to worship both. Both are worshipful, and worthy.

Worship is not required by deities; they don't need it. It's good for us, and it's good for nature and for works of art, because the worship inspires us to preserve them. But the deities can get along without it. They did before (if they're real); they will when we're gone.

Ubar: God Punished Them

Part of my wonderful week in Chicago over Thanksgiving -- the part when I was not going to the opera or having rowdy dinners with lively people -- was spent at Renaissance Books in Milwaukee, four (unheated) floors of dusty fabulousness. Among the books I did not buy (because who wanted to carry all that stuff home? AND find a place for it in my bulging flat?) was Nicholas Clapp's The Road to Ubar -- I remember when the reviews came out, licking my lips. Anyway, it was at my branch library when I got home. Now I'm a little sorry I didn't purchase a copy -- would have made a swell present for godchildren.

Clapp makes documentaries and has a thing for the Arabian desert. He'd already published a book on the Queen of Sheba (I've reserved that one, thanks NYPL) when he wandered through Oman (one of the world's two remaining sultanates -- the other is Brunei) and heard legends of the Lost City of Ubar. Ubar, aka Iram, was a city of matchless wealth and wickedness (can't have one without the other) that (insert name of deity here) punished in some mysterious manner at a point a few generations before Mohammed -- he mentions it in the Koran as a city given over to idolatry. It turns up in many Arab geographies and legendaries (including the 1001 Nights) after that, but -- to Clapp's surprise -- Ubar and its inhabitants, the People of 'Ad, turn up in Ptolemy's Geography, too, listed as a thriving metropolis near Oman. Moreover, bedouins had pointed out some ancient caravan trails (ten lanes wide) as "the Road to Ubar" to an exploring Brit in 1930 (but the road promptly disappeared under dunes). Bedouins, like rural folk anywhere, have long memories, but they also let tales grow and are hazy about dates and facts on the ground. (Ask the locals in Britain or France about the origins of the local Neolithic monuments. Ask them before they read scientific articles, as nowadays they probably have. So have many bedouin.)

It was all very mysterious to Clapp except that there had been a source of fabulous wealth in the area: the Dhofar mountains of Oman had been the world's only source of high-quality frankincense, the mana of the gods, once passionately sought from Rome to Egypt to Jerusalem to Mesopotamia. Caravans crossed the desert for thousands of years. (Some of the trade went by sea, or via the kingdom of Sheba -- yes, her. But the direct route lay through the Empty Quarter.) So Clapp gets the coordinates for that British sighting in 1930 and goes to the satellite boys connected with the Challenger, and sure enough ... there are ancient caravan trails all over the place. Most of them seem to converge near an oasis or two (what a surprise), and soon Clapp and a bunch of crazy adventure-and-archaeology types (with help from the oil companies and approval from Sultan Qabus, a notably progressive type -- does his name signify he's the end of his train, I mean line?) approach an oasis city (pop: 36) that has been built by a ruined fort beside a still-fertile spring that was once a huge oasis (history of the region, once lakes and rivers and savannah, is traced back 100,000 years). The kicker is an enormous sinkhole with the spring in the middle of it. Was this once a city? Did they grow fabulously rich and not too friendly (high prices for passing tourists) on the caravan trade? Did they use so much water that, as the water table sank, it hollowed out a huge cavern under the city? Did the cavern fall in one night, to the shock of everyone in the region -- a shock still reverberating a century or two later, when Mohammed produced the Koran? And are the people of the region, who speak languages unlike any other and only very, very distantly related to Arabic, the ancient wicked people of 'Ad? They say they are, and they still harvest frankincense.

But read the book. It's a very good book, cleverly arranged, a fine mixture of adventure story and scientific report, study of ancient manuscripts and the latest scientific understanding. (You can get a copy from Amazon for two bucks, plus shipping.)

The kicker for me is the myth the disaster aroused: God punished them (because a natural disaster could not have been explained any other way in 350 CE), ergo they were unspeakably evil, not merely rich and inclined to stay that way at your expense. Were the people of Sodom and Gomorrah any more evil than that? (Genesis suggests they were inhospitable, which would annoy bedouin.) Or, to take more modern instances (when people should know better, if people ever learned from experience), have you ever read or seen a fictionalized or filmed version of the end of Pompeii that did not attribute the eruption to immoral behavior, idolatry and all? And say very little about continental drift? How about such American disasters as the Johnstown Flood, the Chicago Fire, the San Francisco Fire-Quake? Yes, they were all attributed to the Almighty's personal intervention to punish the wicked. New Orleans and the WTC? You bet.

If there are gods, they really don't care about idolatry and ill will of men towards men. They've got other fish to fry. They're keeping the natural forces coming and going. They don't speak to us in our own language either. "I told you not to build there! What did you think that lightning bolt meant? No one in his right mind (except a human) would build a city there. It's below sea level. It's right on a major fault line. That mountain smokes, you fools. It's not because it's had a hard day and wants to relax." The book God (or the Gods) writes is the geology of the earth, and we should be able to read it pretty well now -- some splendid minds have been deciphering it, ever since Agassiz and Humboldt. Some of my favorite parts of Ubar concern the piecing together of the ecological history of Arabia, which was verdant and populous before the Red Sea began to widen, pushing Arabia steadily upwards and its water table down and the mountains too high for the monsoon to get over them.... (Clapp mentions that the Red Sea once had a land bridge at its mouth, and Homo erectus could easily stroll across to settle in what is now Yemen.)

People love to project their personal morality onto deity. Don't trust yourself when you do that. Don't trust anyone else who does it, including authors of books hundreds or thousands of years old. Trust geology. Trust scientific evidence. Reinterpret that all you like (by damn, those dinosaurs and their wicked, idolatrous ways), but ... make sense of it ... and you'll find you're reading the real Gospel.

Armageddon Begins at Home

Yesterday: charming couple from New Brunswick (Canada), their first trip to New York, "but we can't wait to come again. We've never done so much walking. And the people are so friendly!" We do tricks for spare change too.

I recommended, as I usually do, walking the Brooklyn Bridge and visiting the Cloisters.

They'd read some commentator or other who said Britain's future, thanks to global warming, would have to include, within the next fifty years, defensive measures against - what two nations? (I was asked to guess, and couldn't.) Spain and Italy - because both are semi-arid and will soon lose what ability to feed their populations they possess. Their people will go abroad in droves, heading for the greener pastures of dank Albion.

No time to refute them there (the Cup Room), so I'll do it here. First, Spain and Italy have the lowest birth rates on earth; their rural regions are depopulating even faster than they are dehydrating; Spain is importing scads of Romanian and Bulgarian peasantry to fill up their emptying landscape (where resident males cannot find females willing to marry them and live in the countryside anyway, per Int'l Herald-Trib). Romanians, it was thought, whose language is not all that different from Spanish would be a better bet than Egyptians or Moroccans as capable of being absorbed into the Spanish fabric. But Romanians are, after all, Romanian - a lady from Barcelona was telling me the other day that crime in that city has reached epidemic proportions since the policy went into effect. (Egyptians would be far more law-abiding, I think. Moroccans ... perhaps not.)

Italy, which I visited in April 2006, is now primarily inhabited by Chinese, Indians, sub-Saharan Africans, North African Arabs, Poles and Croats anyway. Those Italians who have not taken jobs in Germany are living at home with Mom and not getting married or reproducing.

As for Britain - its subContinental influx is only daunted by the enormous breakin of Poles who make up most of the crowds in rush hour London these days (November 2006 visit). (A Pole has regretted this to me: he says the young and liberal are leaving for the West and the old and conservative keep right-wing parties in power back home.)

So who's left to keep a finger in the dyke?

Today I had a tooth filled, and my dentist assured me that the world will have ceased to depend on oil before we run out of it, that only big moneyed interests is preventing the technology of post-petroleum from sweeping the world even as we speak. (And he was doing the talking; my mouth was otherwise engaged.) "They won't get away with it this time," he assured me - we were both expecting oil to fade away thirty years ago. His conspiracy theories are more optimistic than mine.

Slogan for a T-shirt: What would Jeeves do?

Samhain Full Moon

Feeling good. Makes me suspicious. Too used to depression. It could be all the vitamins Mark has been recommending to me. Much better than anti-depressants. My body dislikes anti-depressants. (I never could handle drugs.) But vitamins - or just that I tell myself they're vitamins not drugs - those I handle well.
I'm back from Istanbul. I'm writing up the trip, preparing the photos, concocting the narrative, wondering which blog to put it on, where else to send all this material. I had a wonderful time. I didn't do all the things I wish I'd done. 17 day trips wear me out. I got a bad cold in Edirne and it lasted through the flight home and well into another week. But it's over. I feel healthy. I could almost lift weights if I still belonged to a gym. (And I should, since I lost 15 pounds walking around Istanbul and eating only fresh Black Sea fish.)
Feeling good. Waltzed into town and everyone called me up and began offering me free-lance jobs. I even had to turn one down. They're all getting themselves done on time, and none of them are even distasteful. DVDs reviewed. Manuscripts copy edited. Magazines proofread on line. Checks arriving. (Or they will arrive.) Tickets to everything except "Rock and Roll," for which I may have to pay full price just because I have a crush on Rufus Sewell. This is not a catastrophe.
All my jobs will be done (it seems to me) by Friday sennight - so I can in good conscience fly to Chicago the following Monday. Ideally, someone or three will offer me other jobs before I go, and I shall be able to work on them while away.
I did magic with the Full Moon just before Samhain. I did magic for health and prosperity and inspiration and peace of mind, and Ronald's health, and my mother's health. The Samhain full moon is the mightiest of all full moons; if you do moon esbats and magic, that is the time to send your wish to the Lady of the Lune. She is in the giving vein, more now than elsewhen. Remember that. Then I look Her in the Eye and say, "Lady of Silver Magic, come into my life." (As Leon taught me.)
It's my theory that Witches gathered at the Full Moon because, not wanting to attract attention, they wandered about at such times and could see their way. When the moon was dark, they couldn't see a hand in front of them in the woods or on rural roads, so (my inference is) they did their private magic then, with the home coven crowd. This is all my practical interpretation - I didn't get it from books or Books or traditional lineage or secrets passed in Circle - I thought it all out, and up, for my own self. You don't have to take it seriously if you don't wanna.
I'm reading books about Istanbul: Orhan Pamuk, Graham Greene, Barbara Nadel, Lord Kinross, Stephen Runciman, Freya Stark. There's no point in doing this after coming home, no prospect of a repeat any time in the foreseeable. But because it fascinates me. And I didn't do so much reading before I went (except in guidebooks to places I never did visit) because I was having so many anxiety fits about the trip. None of the horrors came true of course.
(Or very few: the Hotel Tria DID forget to send a car for me to the airport at midnight, when it was far too late to catch a cheap bus to Sultanahmet. My ancient hiking boots did fall to pieces at last, in the mud of Edirne, like some soggy veteran of the Balkan Wars in which that weary city last changed hands, twice.)
But somehow it seemed necessary (necessary? to whom? or what?) that I have the anticipatory ghastlies before I went. Then everything seemed so much easier, pleasanter, better once I was there. And now it all seems so long ago - certainly more than a couple of weeks.
And life is good. Sort of good. Time to anticipate the next disaster.

Where Would They Be Now?

Idly comparing the Tudor sisters, Mary and Bess, with the Stuart lassies, Mary and Anne – the latter do not come off well, do they? The former are such formidable figures, politicians and cultural arbiters, women who scared most of the men they met and didn't hesitate to sign death sentences when they thought fit; the latter domestic and not too bright. I mean, what would they be doing if they were alive now? thought I.
Mary Tudor would be chancellor of a university; charming on social occasions and master of academic trivia in all disciplines, but her smile would grow tight at any sign of insubordination or unethical behavior, and the quality of her mercy would be – strained. She would drive a Mercedes, not too recent but kept in the best condition. There would be gossip about romantic entanglements that did not work out; she would discuss them with no one, even her confessor. (Of course she'd be Catholic; she'd have had audiences with several popes.)
Elizabeth Tudor would have devised some software revolution before she was 25, taken her company public, sold out to Microsoft for enormous stock options and gone on to master any number of other companies, where she would be adorable but ruthless and mercurial. She'd always have a dashing escort, as the years went by ever younger but always hip, and she'd dance till dawn in discreet but expensive clothes in boites where she might be conspicuously the oldest person present, but the one with the most tireless feet, the strongest stomach and the clearest head; she'd never marry. She would drive a Porsche during the week, a BMW motorcycle on weekends and on jaunts to her flat on the Costa, daring but safe.
Their cousin, Mary Stuart, would be an actress. Adored by both sexes in her youth (despite – or because – of several unwise romantic entanglements), she'd remain beloved by women, both housewives and adolescents, well into middle age, though criticized in the press for taking on ever less challenging roles and doing far too many cameos in crusty movies and TV series. She'd drive a Triumph, pausing before she arrived anywhere to take the top down and unpin her hair, so as to show up giving the impression (for paparazzi who love her as much as she loves them) that she has been driving that way the whole route.
In contrast, Mary Stuart II would drive something large and comfortable, in case she stumbles on the perfect antique for the large and comfortable home designed entirely with her man in mind (and room for children too), or perhaps the other house in Holland, which will be flawlessly decorated in a more modern style. She'll never read a book and her musical taste will be cheerily pop or light classical and twenty years behind.
Anne Stuart would never willingly go abroad, except briefly to visit her husband's family in Denmark. She'd drive something dumpy and practical and never go more than 5 km over the speed limit, and she'd restrict public appearances to asking questions at local open meetings with her MP or the school board, and then only when she was outraged. She'd watch soap operas without paying much attention except to hem lines, and she'd never miss church. (Anglican – even Methodist would appall her.)

The sixteenth century was a great one for brilliant women, if you like them. (John Knox didn't.) Where would they be now? Not sunk in obscurity, I'd bet.
Catherine des Medicis would be a public figure, with a talk show where she would resolutely ignore those rumors about her husband's wandering eye or her children's madcap misbehavior. Her blurbs for movies and books would spell instant success; her homely, comfortable face would be familiar from a thousand magazine covers.
Diane des Poitiers, a social figure and a sought-after patron of charity causes and couturiers – until those awful stories about stock options hanky-panky turned out to be true, whereupon she'd settle out of court and retire with becoming dignity to St. Bart's.
Marguerite of Navarre, inheriting the fortune her mother, Louise of Savoy, made from careful investments in blue chips and real estate, would endow libraries and early music festivals until at some point she announced a desire for privacy and withdrew to spend her time writing poetry for obscure but prestigious journals.
Her daughter, Jeanne d'Albret, would devote herself to some very little known but intense cause – a New Age meditation technique to cure drug addiction, perhaps, or birth control by positive thinking and tribal medicine – and ignore all scientific and political opposition until she worked herself into an early grave from anxiety-related heart condition. She wouldn't drive at all, for environmental reasons – or eat meat, for ethical reasons, or smoke (though privately she adores it) because of thinking it the height of rudeness to bring others into contact with her second-hand smoke.
Margot de Valois, Catherine's youngest daughter and Henri IV's first wife, would pose nude for rock videos in her teens, have famous affairs with persons of every age and sex, be arrested for drunken driving or indecent exposure or possession of controlled substances fourteen times by the age of 20, turn her life into best-selling memoirs written while in detox (or low security prison), and eventually become a top-dollar screenwriter with a wicked ear for snappy and obscene epigram.
Marie de Guise, the Tall Duchess, would run a very exclusive school for girls in Lorraine – her strictness belied by her enjoyment of the girls' theatricals.
Gabrielle d'Estrees would be a fashion model, eventually the mistress of a major international figure and the hostess of his less official dinners and weekends.
Anne of Brittany would be teaching school or running an academic department (from a secondary, non-executive positions).

Lucrezia Borgia, inheriting a major position in her father's foundation and ignoring those awful stories about the sources of his money, would roam the world giving it away to organizations devoted to cross-national harmony and alleviating poverty. Her actions would often be misunderstood by a press that had not forgotten her family history.
Isabella d'Este would start her own fashion house and be ruthless in demolishing the competition – whom she would nonetheless ecstatically kiss three times whenever they met. She would chain-smoke and her sympathy for runway models and gofers would be nil. None of her close friends would be women except her sister-in-law, Elisabetta Gonzaga, a professor of some obscure cultural discipline whose unreadable essays would be considered an intellectual peak.
Beatrice d'Este would wear clothes beautifully – often those of her sister's rivals, on occasions when her picture would be sure to be taken so that her sister would see them. She would be an events planner of the most exclusive (and well-paid) variety, on air-kiss terms with popes and prime ministers.
Margaret of Austria-Parma, "Madama," would not get the Pritzger. Despite her considerable ability and renown in the architectural field, she would never quite achieve the first rank.
Christina of Denmark-Lorraine would be content to manage her husband's upscale career, plus encouraging her children in whatever endeavors they attempted. She would also be the principal confidante to her aunts, in-laws, sister, father and neighbors. She would be charmed and flattered by many discreet invitations to have an affair, and she would decline them all exquisitely. She would also turn down invitations to model (in her youth) or run for office (in middle age). She would be famous locally for her green thumb.
Bona Sforza (Queen of Poland) would spend years as an especially annoying commissar for health in that country, criticizing and improving everbody's diet. After the fall of communism, it would be discovered that she had cooperated with the secret police to denounce several colleagues and she would withdraw from public life in disgrace.
Isabella Zapolya would be a pain-in-the-ass journalist, publicizing causes and injustices of no interest to anyone.
Sultan Valide Roxelana would become an influential minister in the Turkish cabinet until rumors of her peculations and coziness with certain corporate execs turned out to be all too true.
Sultan Valide Noorbanu would meddle with all her son's marriages and liaisons until he committed suicide or died of a drug overdose. She would publish a statement: "I suppose these rats the newspaper columnists have to write any garbage they can to earn their bread, but none of them can ever truly understand the pain in a mother's heart."
Archduchess Margot, having won all the literary prizes in college, would enter the diplomatic service due to her gift for languages and work her way up from the lowest level (file clerk? secretary?) to president of the EU.
Between hospitalizations, Juana la Loca would write a series of best-selling denunciations of the psychiatric profession for each of its fashionable methods of treating schizophrenia in turn, plus the perennially best-selling "The Love Trap: How to Let Go of the Man Who Thinks He Owns You."
Her sister, Catherine of Aragon, would be a CEO, taking over after a bitter property dispute divorce and remaining in command despite a broken heart.
Anne Boleyn would be a politically ambitious attorney with a penchant for saying tactless but witty things just when a judge or jury or electorate might be leaning her way.
Catherine Parr would head a major research foundation.
Lady Jane Grey would have tenure but would lose her book contract due to the dryness of her publications.
Lettice Knollys would marry everybody and end up rich, famous, passionately hated, and ambassador to Paris.
Elizabeth Hardwick would build tasteless glass skyscrapers in the middle of historic old cities that do not need or want them.
Giulia Farnese would be a movie star.