Wednesday 2 April 2014

Barbara of Cilli (not really)



Being deeply respectful of the Socratic method of late, and watching too much of The Good Wife, where people always support their arguments with endless knowledge of their subjects, I am starting to really miss the days when I was a lot smarter. Yesterday, while listening to a lady talk about a new book about another lady, although I did manage to suppress my need to ask question just to draw attention and provoke, I asked a few questions I actually wanted answered. (Dad helped me form one earlier that day.) Problem was, I didn’t really know much about this subject (anymore). I forgot oodles. My brain is no longer capable of holding information as it did, when I was younger.. Even if I tried to go to college now, it would be a waste of money, simply because I am unable to remember facts…
Then I realised, I have never been all that incredibly smart and never really new all that many facts – I just read a little bit on the subject and had the arrogance to take on any art historian that had the poor fortune to come my way.
So, nothing much broken there.
Now I feel a lot better. The book I bought was about a countess from these parts, a very picturesque and prominent character in history and who is not easy to write about, because there’s little actual record and ‘historians’ tend to make up ridiculous stories about female characters. The author for a change explained all this and admitted she used a lot of her own profession – clinical psychology – to compare rumours and ‘myths’ with what might be true now, based upon peripheral testimonies. I asked her, among other things, when she talked about national identity, if she thinks, if those famous people from our history didn’t all die out so suddenly and tragically as they did, if this country would every actually be a country: considering we had the uncanny need for serfdom and would never have any rulers of our own, only foreign. We agreed that there would probably be no Slovenia, if the Counts of Celje didn’t render themselves extinct. Slovenians were at the time considered redneck fist power, good only for making problems and bar brawls. Every ruler we ever had was from somewhere else.(Croats had no such problems. When Croatian royalty was needed, whoever had a famous tribal leader father was already pretty much a nobleman.)
Which also makes sense, because if you look at us now, when we finally got independent good twenty years ago, we managed to ruin pretty much everything that was good about this country and is only a matter of time before we start inviting foreign politicians or whatever syphilitic crowned head has ten minutes of time to please rule as some more. 

Other than that, the book is really bad ..
I don't think I've ever bought a bad book before.  O.o  Feels very wrong.

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