El V's recording an album in New Orleans at Piety Street Studios. Then it's Haiti for 7 - 10 days.
The Haitian essay that was to be the centerpiece of an anthology of Postmamboist writings keeps getting more and more built out. The editor is so impressed with it (the word used and repeated by ye editor to describe it is brilliant) that he asked to pull it out for a separate book. He also wants to rush publication, so it's got to be finished before we move in August. Plus the terms of the Fellowship preclude working on any other book than the Starr project.
A slim book, this on Haiti -- out in January, $18.95 in hc -- but dynamite. Real dynamite.
I admit to having trepidations -- Haiti is awful. Our friend who is there, guarding and caring for her six-year-old daughter until she gets a visa to enter the US, is still waiting for the official notification that they can come in and have the dna testing done. They've finally got the dna testing kits, which must be purchased by yourself, from a short list of laboratories in the U.S. (another racket $et in place by the bu$hie$ for their crony crime $yndicates) -- and then they don't mail them to where they are supposed to go, and they lose them, and etc. etc. etc. People like our friends are coming down with terrible infections which the doctors tell them are probably caused by all the unburied bodies all over the place. It rains and rains, mud and mud, heat and heat, mosquitos and mosquitos, crime and crime, desperation and desperation. Ah well. A footwetting for Angola, which is fall 2011, if all goes well.
Then we must pack for Maryland.
Back to my daily work of building bibilography and reading histories of Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina.
I'm having to learn a great deal about boats and ships. The fundamental for this history is that the local and Caribbean history of their boats and ships and their many varieties -- this is a water culture. And are we not Braudelians in our historical philosophy?
Among what I've finally gotten straight so far, is the history of why Virginia always believed it was its entitled right to rule the United States, whever they were located. Now I know, finally, why it's Old Dominion. Though this out of our era of focus, of course.
It's an amazing region, the Chesapeake itself is a world unto itself.
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Do you and/or V know Charles Johnson (University of Washington)? He wrote an excellent novel called Middle Passage, and might be a good resource. I'm sure he'd be interested in the book.
Virginia is beautiful and has many nice qualities, modesty of its residents not among them. My brother moved to Richmond in the late 80s. From what he tells me, he grandchildren or possibly even his great-grandchildren might be considered Virginians.
Indeed, we are familiar with Charles Johnson's work.
Virigina, the source of so many of our nation's woes, beginning from the beginning with the very first colony days.
South Carolina, its less genteel twin, equally so.
A goodly part of that for both of them - indeed, for the entire Chesapeake region too -- can be sourced in the region's close connection with that barbaric island, Barbados -- and thus, due to the traffic in slaves by all of them, to that other, even more barbaric spot, San Domingue.
Love, C.
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