Books

We're doing a summer session Seniors Honors course in African diaspora cultures to the New World back in NYC. Ooofta! The amount of work pulling together a syllabus. We are planning it around the Eltis and Richardson The Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade (2010), Yale.
In 2011 so far, I've worked out to three audio books; this isn't too shabby, considering each cd runs on average 50 - 60 minutes, so I get through two and a part of another cd per work-out: Eudora Welty's Delta Wedding, Machiavelli's The Prince, and now have begun Ivanhoe.

I had not previously read Delta Wedding. Likely I'd have gotten too impatient with the text to actually read it on the page, but listening while working out the endless, minute detail description of objects and feelings, sensations and sensibilities, the constant dweling upon and adoration by all the female characters of every age of philandering, selfish, dickhead Brother George could be put up with. I understand what is admirable about this work. But I don't like it, other than as more cultural information about a time, a place and attitudes. In that sense it is a treasure chest of pertinent information. For instance, though there are numerous characters of color, they are so apart from the white characters as to be aliens.  Unlike the rest of the characters, Welty never provides the reader with sections of their observations and sensabilities from within.  Still, Welty was a more sly author than she's sometimes given credit.

I also possess the temerity to take away from The Prince the idea that in some parts the author was a fool. Not entirely a fool in all the parts, but certainly in some.

Ivanhoe has been one of my favorite novels since childhood, and remains so to this day. I recently re-read Scott's Essay on Chivalry, written as a companion piece to an encyclopedia's section "History of the Middle Ages." (IIRC, this encyclopedia was never published.) As per usual, the conclusion one must come to is that Twain AND the southerners did not read the book that Scott wrote. I'm re-reading (listening, rather, which is a new experience of the novel) again, to re-check my understanding of what is in Scott's text of this novel so battered by critics who seem not to have read Scott either -- they've probably only watched the 1952 movie with Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Taylor. I remain forcibly struck by Scott's earnest yet most cunning critiques of the Middle Ages and 'chivalry,' that the most admirable, active characters are those who not 'gentlefolk,' much less nobility, from whence come all the villains of agency.

The most intelligent characters by far are a slave and a Jewess -- those figures so far from the power structure of the Middle Ages as to be outside it all together. Rowena is not stupid, except, perhaps in sharing an adoration of that blockhead, Ivanhoe, with Rebecca; nor do we see much of Rowena because she spends most of the book as a captive in one way or another throughout to the cultural power structure that in her case includes her gender and her rank, as well as of the villains.

Yet, Scott has a lot of comedy in Ivanhoe, and the comedy does not come at the expense of either Isaac or Rebecca.

People tend to forget that Scott was a lawyer, and evidently a very good one, judging by his success in the profession. He knows exactly what words mean.  He. was not endorsing chivalry as a social or economic code.  In Ivanhoe, Scott shows us how little the codes were observed, and how little protection the codes provided to anyone of any rank, including those who supposedly are chivalry's flower.