Tom Wolfe Explains How & Why the Space Program Died

One Giant Leap to Nowhere

3 screens of this article in the op-ed section, well worth reading.

". . . . A baffling wave of layoffs had begun, and his job was eliminated. It was so bad he was lucky to have gotten this stand-up Spielmeister gig on a tour bus. Neil Armstrong and his two crew mates, Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins, were still on their triumphal world tour ... while back home, NASA’s irreplaceable team of highly motivated space scientists — irreplaceable! — there were no others! ...anywhere! ... You couldn’t just run an ad saying, “Help Wanted: Experienced heat-shield expert” ... the irreplaceable team was breaking up, scattering in nobody knows how many hopeless directions.

"How could such a thing happen? In hindsight, the answer is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers."

A History of American Babysitting & Nancy Drew

Nancy Drew comes up in the long and interesting article plus interview with Miriam Forman-Brunell, the author of Babysitter: An American History, that is up on salondotcom today.

So much interesting history here, that I for one, didn't know:

"I was surprised that some girls even formed baby-sitting unions.

In the years right after the war ends, when the baby boom really begins to soar, parents are desperate for baby sitters. These baby sitters really have developed a sense of themselves as being workers. And they have a sense of what is acceptable to expect of a worker and what isn't.

In various parts of the country they begin to organize these informal unions. Girls get together to draw up a code in terms of what's the minimum wage, what can their employers expect of them. Basically identifying the do's and the don'ts.

The unions don't last. And one of the reasons is that that kind of worker solidarity, agency and empowerment is something squelched during the 1950s, in light of fears about communism, and replaced by notions of domesticity and femininity."

The comments by salondotcom readers are revealing, as one of the letter writers observes, of the same sort of gender bias that the book discusses.

Women who grew up to become influential political figures, attorneys, writers and directors of television and movies speak of who Nancy Drew was for them, growing up.

This is a piece in the New York Times -- which, of course, is slotted into the Fashion and Style section, not the Sunday Book Review section!

From the second 'page':

"And let it not be said that Nancy Drew readers must be cut off when they reach 11. Roslynn R. Mauskopf, 52, a federal judge in Brooklyn, inhaled the books as a girl in Washington, D.C.

“I was a daughter of two Holocaust survivors, and no one would ever let you out of the house with a flashlight and a roadster!” Judge Mauskopf said. Nancy Drew proved “you could go out, go anywhere, do anything and make a difference.”

After law school, Judge Mauskopf joined the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. A young Sonia Sotomayor was just down the hall. Ms. Mauskopf, a career prosecutor, became United States Attorney for the Eastern District.

Shortly after she was named to the federal bench in October 2007, she bought a set of classic Nancy Drew books, volumes 1 through 15. Age notwithstanding, she is in the middle of reading them now."

The article also quotes two people I know, Melanie Rehak, who wrote Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her, met during the Fellowship year at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, and Lisa Von Drasek, children’s librarian at the Bank Street College of Education.

X-posted to GirlyCon on DW.

Round 2 of the New Yorker Haitian Round Table & 1st Mention of TYBTF

The Year Before the Flood via the Miami Herald and Jordan Levine:

Check out the second online roundtable on Haitian music at the New Yorker, with Miami author Edwige Danticat, the amazing writer Ned Sublette (no, he doesn't have a website, but he's a musician, musicologist, producer, Cuban music pioneer and expert, passionate communicator, and author of two of the best ever books on music, Cuba: From the First Drums to the Mambo and The World That Made New Orleans, and the coolest guy to ever wear a cowboy hat in NYC). Ned's new book, The
Year Before the Flood, about his year in New Orleans before Katrina, is available for pre-order at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. He says it's his best work yet, which is saying something.

Via Vaquero:

"Round two of the roundtable on Haitian music, with (what a cast) Laurent Dubois, Elizabeth McAlister, Edwige Danticat, Garnette Cadogan, Madison
Smartt Bell (who sat this round out), and yr humble servant, is up at Sasha
Frere-Jones's New Yorker blog. i'm pleased that they used a photo I took at a gagá in the D.R."

NY Times Obit for Kenneth M. Stampp

Full obituary plus photo here.

His reputation was founded on two books that turned accepted wisdom inside out and engendered seismic shifts in the scholarship of the period. They became staples of university classrooms.

The first, in 1956, was “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South,” which juxtaposed the views of slaves themselves with the more conventionally researched perceptions of slave owners, yielding a far different picture of the institution than historians had previously created.

Rather than portraying slaves as docile, simple-minded creatures who were complicit in their own subjugation, Mr. Stampp showed how by working slowly, breaking tools and stealing from their owners, the slaves were in constant rebellion. And rather than portraying the owners as beneficent upholders of a genteel culture determined to maintain racial harmony, Mr. Stampp revealed the slave-keeping impulse to be an economically motivated choice.

“We now viewed slavery not only through the eyes of the masters but through the eyes of the slaves themselves,” said Leon Litwack, a long-time colleague and former student of Mr. Stampp’s at Berkeley, and the author of “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. “He was clearly one of the influential historians of the 20th century. All you have to do is open history textbooks and compare what you find in them to what you found before 1960.”

The second seminal book, “The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877,” published in 1965, demythologized another favorite trope of previous historians: that the decade after the Civil War was disastrous for the South, a time of vengefulness visited upon it by the North, of rampant corruption and of vindictive political maneuvering.

Mr. Stampp’s more measured account showed that much good was accomplished in the period; he called Reconstruction “the last great crusade of 19th century romantic reformers” and viewed it as a progenitor of the 20th-century civil rights movement that was in progress as he wrote.

Summer Days

Reading:

Winston Grooms's Vicksburg 1863 (2009)

A History of Hungary by a variety of writers and editors (1994)

Together we're re-reading aloud Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

Have not yet begun my amiga's Treason's Shore (2009).

Watching:

Not so much. I put the netflix account on hold until the end of August because I'm not much interested right now, now that the weather's become ideal summer wealther.

I did recently watch American Gangster (2007), inspired by an article amigo Mark Jacobson did for New York Magazine on the Harlem drug lord gangster Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), heir to drug gangster Bumpy Johnson, and who married a Miss Puerto Rico, the corrupt drug cops, the military and the cop (played by Russell Crowe) who turned Lucas and brought them all down, back in the late 60's and 1970's -- the Vietnam era. Its a -- to me -- surprisingly elegant film on all fronts, including the sound.

So it was particularly interesting to watch Soul Power last night (we actually went to a theater), the music festival film that was to go with the film documentary, When We Were Kings,(1994) of the Foreman-Ali championship fight in Kinshasa, Zaire, in 1974, the one in which Muhammed Ali took back the world heavyweight crown. That documentary, despite our best intentions, we missed watching when it came out in 1996. Soul Power, the music festival documentary, was released last week. This one was about the royalty of African Americans – and, omighod, the Fania All Stars – in Africa, Zaire, interacting with African musicians and dancers – and particularly James Brown, who the documentary made the star.

For many of them this was their first visit, and maybe their only visit to Africa, in a time that was still mainly hopeful and energetic about the future, as so much of the continent had only recently receiving its independence -- mirroring the feeling of large optimism of the African Americans in the wake of Black Power, before Reagan, the neoconmovement and crack. How many of these great artists have died since then, among them Celía Cruz – oh, was she great.

The difference between how the African Americans and the Latino artists interacted with the Africans leaped out; the AfAms testifiied while the Latinos did ritual. The Africans 'knew' the Latinos right off the bat. The Fania All Stars were enormously popular all through Africa then, and though no one making the documentary or involved in it would admit it -- they were better known and more influential than James Brown. But let me haste to add, he was equal to Celía Cruz's performance -- and she was brilliant. The Africans SO got her! This is the Congo, from which the most Africans were slaved to the New World, everywhere. They are the fundamental layer of African culture in the Caribbean, Brasil and the U.S. They worshipped the same gods via Palo Monte, with the same fundamental rhythms and percussion and even gesture. Muhammed Ali and the AfAms testified to Black Power, Soul Power, the better future of all black people. They needed interpretors. But the Latinos got down with their African brother and sisters and talked, via rhythm and percussion. This was amazing to watch.

This stuff just leaps off the screen into one's comprehension -- which, of course in 1974 I wouldn't have known anything about.

Naturally, at this point I'm thinking of American Gangster, part of the same era, and that Obama just returned from his first visit to Africa as POTUS.

This is the only film I've watched in a really long time that I wished was longer, that included more.

I'm wishing so much a better future for the nations of Africa and their peoples, particularly the women, and for our own battered and maimed corrupted nation.

On another topic entirely: Publisher says that actual Real Thing bound books with jackets and everything that are The Year Before the Flood will be arriving Thursday THIS WEEK! Woo.

NY Times Review of How The Beatles Destroyed Rock 'n Roll

Unlike so many of the NY Times Sunday book reviewers this one, by a NY Times music staff writer, is fair and balanced -- and it is positive too, as well as fun to read. The writer isn't grinding any axes on either his own or the paper's neocon editors' behalf. But then, this is only a history of popular music, not about, say, a city the neocons have done their best to destroy.

Hemingway -- Spy for the KGB

Who knew? Surely though, back in those days, a lot of Somebodies would have cared!

Story here.

Its section on the author's secret life as a "dilettante spy" draws on his KGB file in saying he was recruited in 1941 before making a trip to China, given the cover name "Argo", and "repeatedly expressed his desire and willingness to help us" when he met Soviet agents in Havana and London in the 40s. However, he failed to "give us any political information" and was never "verified in practical work", so contacts with Argo had ceased by the end of the decade. Was he only ever a pseudo-spook, possibly seeing his clandestine dealings as potential literary material, or a genuine but hopelessly ineffective one?