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All the reviews I’d read assured me that Hilary Mantel’s historical novel is compelling, witty, and accessible, but I was still worried that the characters would talk like this: “How now, good my liege? Aroint thee, wench!” Fine, they talk like that in Shakespeare, but he wrote it back when they talked like that.

Sometimes you feel like reading a Middle Earth epic written partly in Sindarin, sometimes you’re in the mood for very purple prose (Tina swears by The Lymond Chronicles of Dorothy Dunnett), but I’m in a hurry. I have to clear my backlog in January because in February we’re doing the big fat Russian novels. Because we feel like it.

Thomas Cromwell, painted by Hans Holbein the Younger.

Fortunately Wolf Hall is accessible, the prose lyrical but tight, the direst moments laced with humor. When Cardinal Wolsey is exiled to a filthy, unkept house, Thomas Cromwell takes charge. “I will send some people,” he says, “to sort out the kitchens. They will be Italian. It will be violent at first, but then after three weeks it will work.” The complexities of European history are laid out in a thorough yet appealing manner, so the reader need not have a detailed knowledge of England under Henry Tudor. (What little I know of English history I learned from Ladybird books, movies, and the Shakespeare class of Professor Wilhelmina Ramas, a brilliant and exacting teacher.)

Thomas Cromwell is the hero of the novel—interesting choice, given all the much more glamorous characters running around the court at the time. Henry VIII is king and smitten with Anne Boleyn, who won’t put out until he marries her, so he has to divorce his queen Katherine who, inconveniently, is the aunt of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V. Circumstances familiar to viewers of The Tudors, the Dynasty version of English history.

Henry VIII by Hans Holbein the Younger. Doesn’t exactly make you cry, “Good God, it’s Jonathan Rhys-Meyers!” Henry VIII’s thigh was bigger than Jonathan’s waistline. (Every time I see that Hugo Boss ad with the pout and the swiveling hips I want to send Jonathan to a convent.)

On one hand if you’ve seen the Tudors, you know the plot outlines, the major characters, and the alliances. On the other hand if you’ve seen the Tudors, you may not recall who Thomas Cromwell is. He’s that shadowy, weaselly secretary to the king, the one who gets into trouble for promoting Henry’s marriage to the unattractive Anne of Cleves. (When he was looking for wife number four, Henry sent his court painter Hans Holbein to paint Anne of Cleves and her sisters. Henry himself picked Anne to marry; apparently Holbein’s portrait was too flattering. See what they had to put up with before photography was invented.)

All the men in the Tudor court are named Henry or Thomas, all the women Anne or Jane, and it gets confusing at times.

M Zouch, lady-in-waiting to Jane Seymour, by Hans Holbein the Younger

The Thomas Cromwell who emerges from these pages is a fully fleshed-out human being: ambitious but kind, loyal but pragmatic, a man who knows all the angles but tries to hang on to his soul. Badly-treated by his own father, he is good to his wife and children and keeps a large and happy household. In contrast the sainted Thomas More is portrayed as a snob, mean to his wife and children, a ruthless torturer eager to burn heretics at the stake. His goodness has made him inhuman.

I’m more than halfway through Wolf Hall. Wolsey is dead, the king still hasn’t gotten his divorce and Anne Boleyn still hasn’t given in. But Cromwell has been put in charge and he is “the cleverest man in England”; he will find a way to give Henry what he wants.

Three Princesses of Saxony: Sibylla, Emilia and Sidonia by Lucas Cranach the Elder. I call it Fashionable Ladies of 1535.

by Phillip Niemeyer in NYT.

A still from Kagadanan sa Banwaan ning nga Engkanto (Death in the Land of Encantos)

There are too many self-proclaimed experts making pompous, facile statements about Maguindanao as if they knew what they were talking about. We need to hear from someone who’s actually lived there and knows what it’s like, not just theoretically but viscerally.

Sherad Sanchez (who made Huling Balyan Ng Buhi and Imburnal) reminded me that Lav Diaz (Heremias, Encantos) is from Maguindanao. So I emailed Lav Diaz, who is in New York to visit his kids. He will be back after Xmas to finish his film in Bicol. His reply:

“Maguindanao… ang hirap, ang sakit. I’m numbed. Puro iyak at galit na lang ang nagagawa natin. Last May, I participated in La Salle University’s “Designing Peace: The Role of Imagination in Conflict Resolution”. I submitted an installation piece called Mindanao: A work-in-progress.

“Salamat gid. Lav”

The full text of Makati Rep. Teodoro Locsin, Jr’s speech at the Joint Session of Congress on Proclamation No. 1959 (Martial Law in Maguindanao), 10 December 2009.

Mr. Speaker, Mr. Senate President,

I submit that rebellion here is not an exclusive reference to a particular provision of a particular law; but to a wide yet unmistakable, general but not indiscriminate allusion to a state of affairs that has deteriorated beyond lawless violence, beyond a state of emergency, to an obstinate refusal to discharge properly the functions of civil government in the area, by, of all people, the duly constituted but now obstructive authorities therein.

Continue reading Locsin’s speech.

Yesterday we crossed the sea of traffic from Makati to Luneta to see the Philippine-American War exhibition War and Dissent at the National Museum. The Salvacion Lim Higgins exhibit is also at the museum, so we planned to spend the whole afternoon.

After an eventful trip, details of which I will not bore you with, we arrived at the old Senate building which now houses the museum. It’s a beautiful building, so that in the distant event that the exhibits don’t appeal to you, you can enjoy the architecture. The guard at the gate said the War and Dissent and Slims exhibitions were in the building across the street. The parking lot was curiously empty.

We crossed the street and found a metal barricade across the entrance, and the door locked. In our excitement to see the exhibits we still didn’t get it. We walked around the building and found some workmen exiting the gate. By climbing over it. They advised us to go round to the other entrance. When we had circumnavigated the building we found a security guard who informed us that the National Museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Aargh. We thought the public museums of earth were closed Mondays and open the rest of the week.

I suggested a cold drink before we headed back across the traffic. There’s a restaurant in the Orchidarium beside the museum. The Orchidarium itself is under renovation, but the restaurant is open. There was only one other customer, working at his laptop, and occasionally doing sit-ups on the bench. It is a good place to write—it’s quiet, surrounded by flora, and it feels isolated even if the traffic is screeching and honking right outside the gate. We ordered watermelon shakes, bananas deep-fried in sugar and sesame seeds, and ube rolls, and laughed at ourselves for being idiot tourists.

We don’t get to read, see, or hear much about the Philippine-American War, which is still referred to in many books as “the Philippine insurrection”.

Now there’s an exhibition at the National Museum called War and Dissent.

A John Sayles movie on the Philippine-American War is in pre-production. The film stars Academy Award winner Chris Cooper and will be shot in Bohol early next year. Sayles’ novel of the Philippine-American War will be out in 2010.

Fully Booked branches are flooded with copies of Stanley Karnow’s book In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines.

Why the sudden uptick of interest in the Philippine-American War? Have they just realized that on the issue of the American presence in Iraq and Afghanistan we’ve been there, been that?