Three Reading Wednesdays At Least!

A splendid trio of titles this week: two historical novels and one a studied account of a famous event in literary history.

These are the current trade paper reprint editions from Houghton Mifflin / Mariner imprint that I acquired.

The two historical novels are both by Anya Seton, and both of them are among first historical fiction I read written by women, read in that boundary year between 12 and turning 13, certainly the ones I remember, along with Gone With the Wind.

The Winthrop Woman I read at the lake during the periods I wasn't allowed in the water.  It was among the Book of the Month Club offerings that my mother brought to the annual July sojourns at the Lake. in the vain hope that she'd have so much time on her hands she'd be able to catch up with her reading.

I had already read Gone With the Wind, at the end of spring, just when school let out.  This was from my grandmother's shelves, from where I'd previously appropriated Ben-Hur and Ivanhoe, both of which I'd re-read several times already.

When school resumed in the fall, that year I was bused everyday to Town, where the county public library was located, and for which my mom saw to it I'd gotten my library card as soon as first grade was completed. The library was divided into the juvenile side and the adult side.  It may have been me, but it seemed the division was so strictly observed that surely a lightening bolt would strike -- or expulsion from the library at least -- would ensue if I stepped over that invisible line.  But now I was a freshman (rather early but I'd been skipped a grade), maybe I could sneak across that line and browse among the mysteries those adult shelves held.

Sure enough, on one of those first explorations I discovered Seton's Katherine.  I no longer recall whether I was aware that the same writer was responsible for both novels -- it's quite likely that I was not.  But I do recall in detail that book -- a dull green library binding, with darker letters spelling out the title.  It was a fat book too, and I'd already associated a fat book with an exciting read back in time. Why this particular book with dull covers (only the latest books acquired possessed the colorful dust jackets, preserved in see-through plastic) got my attention, I no longer remember.  It's not as though Katherine was even a girl's name I liked, surrounded at that time by a number of bullying Kathys, and attracted as I was to exotic women's names such as Deirdre and Charlotte.

But devour I did Seton's imaginative creation out of the few facts known about Katherine de Roet - Swynford, and finally Duchess of Lancaster and ancestress of English Kings.  This is where I first encountered the existence of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, Geoffrey Chaucer, England's alliance with Portugal and her national fortune founded in wool, and a great deal more about the middle ages in England that have interested me every since.  I puzzled over the differences between this Middle Ages and that of Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe.

So, I  learned there were chronological, i.e. historical differences -- periods -- even within a the demarcation of the Middle Ages of my history classes. I also noticed -- vaguely! --  there seemed differences in stories of a woman as the eponymous title of a novel, from those of an eponymous novel written by a man with male hero.

Oddly, I did know the meaning of "eponymous" at that age, another of the random bits of information gleaned from omnivorous reading and The Book of Knowledge volumes'  literature sections.  Yet, while had noticed the author of Ivanhoe was a man, I'm still not sure I actually noticed that Seton was a female -- partly because I was distracted by the "Anya" -- what kind of name was that?) I did not notice however, that I thought of both Ben-Hur and Ivanhoe as heroes, but I did not think of Katherine as a heroine.  She was "just" a woman, though fascinating.  unlike, any women I knew, in a milieu I did not understand, but which glowed with the colors of the frequent jewels described the narrative. By comparison, Elizabeth Winthrop and her colonial Puritan world were close and familiar.

Yet Katherine wasn't entirely unlike women I knew, or at least knew of, during her poverty stricken years, as depicted in Seton's imagination, married to the knight Hugh Swynford.  She was left alone to manage on a poor country estate, to make do with little, while trapped in marriage with a man she did not like, forced to have his children. That was my take-away from the novel from the reading back then.

However, I'm not certain that's what Seton actually wrote in Katherine. I began reading Katherine last night, and so far, I'm still very impressed with the book, though perhaps in a different way than the 12 year-going-on 13 me was.  Yet, in the end, Seton's writing is creating the same effect -- constant page turning to follow the journey of this most sympathetic and interesting of heroines.  The novel opens when Katherine's 15;  as far as I got last night, though married, she's still only 15. I can't wait to learn what comes next, and how it compares -- and / or contrast -- with what I remember.

There isn't anything more satisfying to read than a good historical novel.

The non-fiction title among the three books this week is The Immortal Evening: A Legendary Dinner with Keats, Wordsworth and Lamb by Stanley Plumly. This is one of the events in the history of English Romantic Literature that profs of our graduate seminars liked to refer to.  Now a whole book has been published about it.  It looks good, because in that company, how not?

November

Today, someone asked, with, presumably, some sarcasm intended, "What is the purpose of November?" Generally the respondents agreed: there was little reason to have November, and no use for it.

But, in me, having come up in the rural cultures of the northern midwest, the question provoked a cascade of memories -- all very good memories.  I am not recollecting through a haze of nostalgia either. Much of my memory of growing up there is not only not good, but actively painful, physically and emotionally. But November and December were a vacation from the meanness that was entwined with my upbringing.

So, what is November for?

November's your last chance to ready and settle for the winter. November's for putting on the storm windows, insulating the water and sewer lines, and the basement foundation around the house. It's for turning the silage one last time before the deep freezes set in; for cleaning, greasing up and putting away the trucks and farming machinery in the garages and quansets --  and for fitting the tractors with the front snow loaders to clear away the blizzards' leavings.

November's for butchering the hogs and smoking the hams. November's for 

Skinned, dressed deer, hanging, prior to butchering and sausage-making. Garages are typically cold, an excellent place for this stage of making a deer edible.

shooting turkeys, ducks, geese, pheasants and grouse, and getting the deer rifles primed for for deer season -- opens November 8, closes November 24, more or less, depending on the year (hope you've got your license to hunt all those critters, with wings or four legs). Then comes the frenzy of sausage making -- pork and venison ground together  

Sausage making is a typically communal event, with friends and extended family all doing something -- including drinking, of course.  It's one of the few food prep activities there in which men are typically hands-on participants.

the pork lard to provide the moistness that distributes the flavor of the seasonings throughout soft sausage, and allows for easier cooking (hard, dry sausages demand a different kind of treatment, particularly in terms of the amount of fat and, in some sausages, the amount of blood used, i.e. blood sausage).

Excellent ground for pheasant hunting.

Typical Thanksgiving table decorations

November's for Our Moms deciding who in the family hosts Thanksgiving this 

Fruit cake seasoning in cheesecloth soaked with alcohol of choice, within tightly closed tin containers down in the cool, dark basement.

year, and getting ready for that, while making sure the fruit cakes laid down in bourbon and / or whiskey and / or brandy back at the end of September are absorbing the alcohol properly and not drying out. It's the time to order the 

A typical Christmas card -- sparkles! -- sent and received by friends, family and community.

Christmas cards (the Christmas catalogs had arrived already, weeks ago) and make the list of who we're sending to this year. It's for starting all the baking and cooking for the rest of the year. Our Moms also sit with the teachers in church and school, planning the annual Christmas programs (all open to the public) which the kids performed. Choir practice in church and school, for the recitals at home and on the regional television station. It's for the neighborhood moms carpooling the kids for ice-skating in the town picking which weekends each will do it.

For both Moms and Dads it is time to draw up the gift lists, not for family, but for all those such as pastors, teachers (music, religious, secular school), secret friend in Homemakers' Club, Ladies Club, PTA, Ladies Aid, etc. Also to schedule these societies' visits to shut in in the local Rehab homes and their own Christmas parties. November is when they decide what the family budget will be for under the tree presents left by Santa Clause and  the special inter-and intra-family gifts.

In November we can catch our first sighting of the winter of a Great Snowy

In November Our Dads are deciding how many and what sort of conifers the churches and schools would purchase, testing the lights, buying new ones.  The trees all have to go up by the first day of advent, which is the fourth Sunday before Christmas Day, which is the Sunday nearest November 30, and ends on 

Christmas Eve . Our Dads have to order the nuts and candy that go into the Christmas sacks every child receive at our churches and schools. Our Dads go

There's a theme that runs through these weeks. Mostly for the men.  Nor does anyone drink wine -- though, by now, a lot of women do, and do.  It was eggnog for them back in those days, for New Year's Eve!

hunting a lot and hang out with their buddies and, when the sun goes down, which it does earlier every day, finish the day in one or another bar, before going home to supper. Our retired Grandads who live in town are getting licenses for 

The ice fishing sheds weren't this sophisticated when I was growing up -- and were home made, not prefab.

their ice houses on the lake and the river -- upstream from where we kids go ice

This will go in the nip thermos, while a separate thermos has coffee.

skating -- checking their tackle, the kerosene heaters, coolers, nip thermos and other gear for a winter of ice fishing with their cronies. Sometimes they'll invite their sons, sons-i-law and grandsons.

November, in the rural community where I come from, along with December the grown-ups are in a good mood. These weeks are the Adults' Time for intense socializing. This is when they begin the winter of getting dressed up, going to

Yes, the Pavilion lived on for an astonishing time after my parents' day; it finally burned down sometimes in the early 80's, if I've got that right.  The insurance payout must have been good ....

the steak house before a night of dancing at the Pavilion, when they visit neighbors at night and play cards. For them it's recuperation from the backbreaking physical; work from before sunup to past sunset (and the sun rises very early and sets very late up there in summer) of keeping a farm that supports a family.

I loved those two months, that concluded every year with a two-week vacation for us kids too. But without November, December could never roll as splendidly as it did -- and no matter what else had happened in the previous ten months. it always did, every year I was growing up.

Robert O'Connell's biography of W.T. Sherman

This summer Random House published a new biography of President Grant's general (and President Lincoln's too, of course): Fierce Patriot: The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman, by Robert L. O'Connell.

O'Connell, with his history Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, has spent his

professional career within the National Ground Intelligence Agency, much information about which is not easily come by, as when one clicks on the url for the NGIA, one is barred as unsafe. However, there is this: and this, and many other sites, since, it seems, the agency is huge, with so many employees there are housing / real estate offices dedicated to helping them find somewhere to live within the Charlottesville area. Monticello is also in the area, illustrating once again how much Virigina -- and Maryland -- have profited since the federal capital was moved from Philadelphia to a situation carved from what was their state land. 

These days O'Connell's a visiting professor at the Naval Postgraduate School, was formerly a contributing editor to MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. Over the course of his career he's written six books of military history, and a novel, Fast Eddy: A Novel in many Voices, a fictional biography of Captain Eddie Rickenbacker. PW review here.

This favorable review of the novel opens by characterizing the author as

". . . an iconoclastic military historian . . ."

so one cannot be surprised by O'Connell's leaving the material of about Sherman the small child who loses his father, is separated from his mother and siblings to be raised in a foster family, not at the front of his biography, but at the end. The first interest O'Connell has in these matters is that Sherman's stepfather is wealthy and influential, thus an appointment to West Point, and rapid, early preferment - promotion in Sherman's career after graduation. These effects, O'Connell believes, part of the complex power struggle between Sherman and his foster father, who becomes his father-in-law, for possession of his foster-sister, then wife, Ellen, who is described as "Daddy's Girl."

Divided into "Part I: The Military Strategist"; "Part II: The General and His Army"; "Part III: The Man and His Families" the narrative moves as rapidly as "Sherman's Bummers" the foragers who fed the Union army as it burned slavery to the ground during Sherman's March to the Sea.

A short book, written in a rather annoying slangy style that one feels the author's editor imposed, this isn't the biography of a whole man in his times, in the way David McCullough's John Adams attempts. This is the biography of man who interests military men written by a military historian. Thus it opens with West Point, and concludes with Sherman's mistress. The first chapter provides the information that Sherman was very fond of women.  Later O'Connell describes Sherman as possessing the healthy sex drive of a warrior.

The Plain of West Point (1828); little if any of pre-20th century West Point remains.

Most of the emphasis of the West Point period -- gotten through briefly -- is what it meant to all these future officers of the Civil War that they shared the West Point experience, even that this was more important to all of them than their experience in the Mexican War.  It was West Point that instilled into them all what to expect from each other, no matter which side they were on.  Yet, when it was necessary, in order to win and finish the war, both Grant and Sherman behaved in unexpected ways, which shored them both up when necessary. The south's in-fighting -- every man king of his own plantation -- made this kind of  effective outside-the-box behaviors impossible.

It's an interesting slant through which to view General Sherman's mind, and the military mind in general, or, which, perhaps, provides some unasked for information about mind of the author. One of the elements O'Connell's book keeps to the fore throughout is the political and personal jockeying within the army itself, before, during and after the war, for the sake of favor, promotion and fame. As most historians should learn early on, whether or not military matters are their area, is that war provides great opportunity to generals with dreams of political office, officers dreaming of general's stars, and even those who are considered in peace times of little account -- as with, General Grant, who would never have become General Grant or President Grant without the War of Southern Rebellion.

There is new information in this book for me, who is neither a military historian nor a specialist in the War of Rebellion itself and the battles, but who knows well the lead-up to secession and the war, and what happened to the country -- and the African Americans -- after Appomattox. This reader was taken very early by

O'Connell's account of Sherman in the second Seminole War, which began in 1835, and lasted just long enough for the new West Point graduate to get a bit of a baptism as to battle and campaign. However, O'Connell doesn't mention -- isn't interested? -- that the Seminoles was a 'new' tribe, created out of self-emancipated slaves and survivors of Mississippian tribes who suffered genocide during the colonial South Carolina era, and finished off by Jackson as consequence of the War of 1812.

This is why we always need to read more than a single biography -- or even four or five -- of significant figures in history -- there's always something new to learn, and something the writers don't know.

Conference

To describe the conference's focus as plainly as possible:

Currently, the revolutionary, game changer in terms of nineteenth century U.S. historical research is the recognition of, and redemption of, the abolitionists, their efforts and actions, black and white. Abolitionists were as much written out of the narrative as until recently slavery had been by the revisionists of the Glorious Lost Cause. If looked at they were considered at best cranks and sidebars.  Without their fanaticism and fire eating. it was said, the war wouldn't have happened, as we saw, for instance, Edmund Wilson going on about with many a sneer, in his Patriotic Gore (1962 -- I talked about this myself, a while back, here), published as part of the centennial war observances.

Interesting too, though nobody made a deal of it, mentioned now and again in passing, currently our government has been taken over by radical extremist aristo plutocrats, just as it was back in the years leading up to the Civil War. (Though, Foxessa observes, currently there's no competing capitalist economic system to counter the current plutocrats, as there was with the northern states' industrialization, transportation and communications explosions.  NOBODY wants to spend money on infrastructure -- which is the ultimate win-win for the Jacksonians, nullifiers and slave power sorts -- they didn't either!)

The coolest thing?  How generationally diverse the conference was. A high school kid, who asked questions in every q&a session after the panels.  In the summing up period, he inquired, "How did anybody buy this shit ever? about slavery being right, that people who wanted to stop it were bad, and that slavery was a good thing for anybody, and nobody should go to war about it?"  The way the Big Dawgs from the unis converged upon him, he's going to be offered some very nice packages at some very nice schools, straight into grad school programs of his choice.

What wasn't cool?  Only one person on the stage / podium, etc., as presenter or moderator, was a person of color, and he was a moderator, i.e. he didn't say anything, other than introductions. There was one woman of color, a great scholar, whom we do quote in The American Slave Coast, presenting.  But she was the only woman and person of color there as one of the "stars", and who talked. There were some female (white) grad students or new faculty who presented terrific material, though mostly bibilographic, especially the one who did it for the Underground Railroad.  She got maybe the biggest round of applause for someone who wasn't a Big Dawg.

The conclusion was that, yes, the War to End Slavery was inevitable. Nothing could have stopped it from taking place.  Recall, historians are not at all fond counter-factuals, as they are irrelevant to what did happen.

The Take Away: it's time for American historians to research deeply the colonization movement, as well as look more at anti-slavery and abolition actions and movements locally.  We must remove the Civil War from the discourse, because nobody knew they were living in the antebellum era and nobody knew there was going to be a war, much less that the abolitionists would win it.  Rather, right up to secession the abolitionists were so depressed by what looked like the Slave Power's ever expanding power (particularly as it had taken over the federal government entirely, which locked down any other progressive action, not even to mention abolition or emancipation), so that not only did Frederick Douglass believe he had to move to Haiti -- self-colonization -- but a movement began to have the north secede from the USA -- which wouldn't have happened, but it does show how high the levels of disappointment and pessimism had risen.

Thomas Jefferson wasn't mentioned once by anybody.

Peaky Blinders - Season 1

This is a period (crime) family drama from the BBC.

The time is 1919.  The place is Birmingham.  Location shooting in Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds and another city I don't know, Dudley. Among the rcognizable

actors Sam Neill has a lead role, though he's neither a Cardinal nor a magician this time around, but Inspector Major Chester Campbell, the antagonist of the

Peaky Blinders' gang leader, Thomas Shelby, played by Cillian Murphy.

It will bring Boardwalk Empire to mind, not only because of the time period, but by how stylish-glossy-classy the production values and the framing of scenes are, the ensemble cast, how hard it is out here for a gangster whose family will screw with his brilliant planning, while he and his cronies are suffering PTSD from their sacrifice in France for a King George who doesn't give a damn today.  And yes! Winston Churchill has a part too.

Moreover, it takes all the way through most of the five of the six episodes before the romantic leads, Tommy and Grace, have sex.  Nor do they do they do the rippingofclothesthrowagainstthe wallonthetable etc. They do it slowly, carefully, Their connection is about a kind of healing for them both. They have gotten to take the measure of each other. They fairly know each other in important ways already.

These are the sorts of elements that appeal to this viewer.  I particularly like the scenes of men who are making Birmingham steel, and why communist addresses about the need for solidarity and striking appeal to them, come home to even lower wages than before. The flames, sparks and heat pour from the furnaces into the streets.  Coal is heaped everywhere.

Like Boardwalk Empire, Peaky Blinders relies nonperiod music, which I dislike , particularly since there's so much good music from the era that could have been used. To be fair, Peaky Blinders, like Boardwalk, does use period music as well, however it's mostly as solo vocalist. There was, thoug, a splendid St. James Infirmary in the first episode, which was ideal, as one can see from the history of the song. But for narrative and the title sequences, the show uses instruments and arrangements that weren't invented yet. This may not be a problem for others since it doesn't seem to be brought up, but it bothers me a great deal.  It sort of tells me that the production doesn't have faith in its own effort.

Some have said Peaky Blinders moves so slowly they lost interest (people have said the same about Boardwalk Empire. The first episode was slow, I'll agree, but I didn't mind.  It gave me the time to find out who these people are with whom I would spend six episodes.  As well it gave my ear a chance to acclimate a bit to dialect. The following episodes move much faster.

I do have a question -- there are a large number of horses, some of them magnificent, in the series.  Considering, this is 1919, would the equine population expended during WWI have been replenished to such a degree so soon?  Or, which is more than possible, I don't know what I'm talking about? OTOH, with all that coal and all those horses, the streets are remarkably pristine.

At one point Thomas Shelby rides a pure white (well, probably, technically grey) stallion through these coal-lined streets.  Though the stallion balks at the noise and the fire, his coat remains pristine -- not even a fleck of soot on his fetlocks.  I don't believe that.

There is ample blood and violence and occasions to show men being as awful to each other as they can be.  They're often not much nicer to women either.

Season 1 is available on disc and streaming from netflix.  Season 2 will be available in November.

The American Slave Coast

Eyes red, eyes croxxed.

Fact checking, fact checking, fact checking.

Revising, revising, revising.

Copy editing, copy editing, copy editing.

Proofing, proofing, proofing.

Reading, reading, reading.

TASC is leaving us, very, very, very soon.

Until it returns for the final round of copy editing and proofreading.

One Might Think Reign Writers Channel Nostradamus

Season 2 of Reign opened October 2, with an episode titled "The Plague" -- following right where the first season's last episode left off.

Despite the pus and rot of plague, Reign still appears more a show of dresses and costumes (not historically accurate, of course, any more than anything else in the show is) paraded on a runway, that is fabricated out of a hodgepodge of Renaissance "architecture," decor and ornamentation."

The actresses -- and actors as well -- appear stand-ins for the producers' and writers' fantasies of power and romance as well as the fantasies of their intended audience -- with horses! swords! and castles! They are dressed like dolls, but like dolls they tend to look alike, while their acting is fairly non-existent, with the exception of Megan Follows and some others. However, Follows as Queen Catherine de Medici, isn't a girl like the others, and is an experienced actress of substance.

Lola

Mary

It is difficult at times to tell the girls apart, particularly when they aren't in the same scene. Mary and one of her ladies (her ladies, like her, historically, were all named Mary, which would never do in a television series -- not to mention England's Queen Mary Tudor), Lola -- really? Lola, from Scotland in the 16th century?* -- look so much alike that in the early episodes they are nearly identical. Soon the stylists had to give Lola extra-curly hair in every scene so we could distinguish her lady-in-waiting more easily from Mary Queen of Scots.  The actresses' voices have the same pitch, and they deliver their lines in the same flat manner. Their acting range goes from standing there to talking head -- but then, neither do the male actors.  Both young men and women indicate firmness of whatever by clenching their teeth, sort of.

A strange show, that is possessed of an extravagant budget that allows for Irish castles and even the veddy high class castle turned hotel, outdoor sequences, the wardrobes and all those jewels.  It also was able to create enormous additional sets that stand in for the French royal castle, with ceilings even, that few shows can afford.

As well as plundering history, the writers plunder familiar fantasy fiction, presenting recognizable story lines from other sources. After the pilot was picked up, and at some point into the CW commissioned episode, CW asked for a full season of 23 episodes, thus the need to write very fast, with a principle plot that turned on little than will she or won't she end up with her true love, or will she be killed before she decides,  it would be necessary to grab from somewhere. But this grabbing doesn't have the same non-self-conscious insouciant glee of not taking oneself seriously that gave the first seasons of Lost Girl such fun and verve.

As a tween and teen I'd have adored Reign -- horses! swords! castles! that mixes in monsters and other supernatural something-or-other.  At that age I wouldn't have noticed writing weaknesses or poor acting.

But even at that age, with my schooling in costume via the period art illustrations in my piano lesson books of adaptations of classical composers works, and The Book of Knowledge spreads of Renaissance art and portraits, I would have noticed the clothes were not really period. With the comparative knowledge of Jewish, Catholic and Protestant religions, and their historical milieus, already drilled into me via our church's pastor, I would have been much annoyed by how the show attempts to make pagans some sort of magic stand-in for the French protestants, the Huguenots, by calling the pagans heretics.  Then as now, that is wrong.  A heretic is:

1 : a dissenter from established religious dogma; especially : a baptized member of the Roman Catholic Church who disavows a revealed truth. 2 : one who dissents from an accepted belief or doctrine : nonconformist.

Pagans cannot be heretics for they were never baptised into the Church, or left the Church. However, as far as the Roman Church and French royals were concerned, the Huguenots were heretics.

But a show doesn't want to offend anyone, and nobody would want to speak in a Catholic country (much of the first season was shot in Ireland), probably, of how, in this very era, Queen Catherine de Medici and King Francis -- Mary Queen of Scots' husband -- and that following with Louis XIV, killed, burned, tortured and looted the Protestants -- a pogrom. Named enemies of France, thousands who were able fled the country -- which created serious financial troubles for Louis XIV.

Moreover, as King Francis participated in this, and he's the romantic lead, the writers wouldn't want to mention the historical actualities. Particularly the show wouldn't want to mention how much his Queen, Mary of Scots, Reign's female romantic lead, encouraged him in the prosecution.

History, the bathtub in which everybody's entitled to potch!  Full speed ahead! Watch out for Abraham Lincoln hunting vampires who create the plague -- as well as African American slavery.

--------------------------

*  Lola is the diminutive for the Spanish Dolores -- "sorrows" as in Nuestra Senora de los Dolores.  Wiki helpfully informs that:

Lola may also be used as a short form of the unrelated German name Aloisia. The name Lola is also common in Africa; in Nigeria, many feminine names are shortened to Lola, such as Temilola or Damilola. Lola (Tajik for tulip) is also a feminine name in Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. It is derived from the Persian لاله or lâleh.

Not The Best of Days Or Night Either

Over the weekend a very close friend and colleague collapsed.  He was diagnosed with a non-infectious form of meningitis.  He's been in a medically induced coma ever since.  This has depressed el V as much as would be expected.

Yesterday, before going to the hospital to sit with R, I sliced open my left forefinger while washing el V's tea pot. A chunk had broken out of the rim, which I hadn't noticed until the blood rushed out.

Sat with R for a while. El V played him some music that he knows R likes and R waved his foot when el V addressed him, to say what he was going to play.  The doctors had expected r would have died by now. The meningitis infection had indeed spread into his brain.  He's a tough bird, all right.

After leaving the hospital I went to get my annual flu shot -- and unlike previous flu shot this one hurt and hurt worse as the night went on and hurts like heck this AM.  I Feel draggy and tired, and my throat is scratchy.  I've never had this kind of reaction to a flu shot before.

It's a kinda dark day.  Well, honestly no, it's not at all.  It just feels that way. Weather yesterday was very nice, and warm -- though windy, which may be the real culprit responsible for the sore throat. Today is nice too, but not as warm.

I'm doing the acknowledgements in preparation for really getting The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry out of the house. I should be happy -- particularly as writing thank yous is such a pleasurable part of of making a book. Instead, I feel, depressed.

Maybe it's due to having spent these last weeks studying the slave trade in American Indians, particularly that engaged in by colonial South Carolinians.  The numbers from the Mississippian culture tribes populating what would become the antebellum Cotton Kingdom are mind-boggling. That so many survived for Andrew Jackson, later, to wage a war of extermination against them for more decades, should put down for once and for the lie justifying the land thefts by the invaders settlers because "there was nobody there and those who were weren't making use of the land anyway".  The decades' long depopulation of these lands via slave trade mirrors in every way the methods used in Africa, just as Jefferson Davis's CSA government, right down to naming the president's house in Richmond, "the White House," mirrors that of the Union.  Of course, there were significant differences too -- slavery, no draft, no interstate cooperation, invasion of other lands for conquest to spread slavery, etc.



I've been listening to interviews and talks by David McPherson this last week, promoting his new biography, Embattled Rebel: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief (Penguin). These have reminded me of that mirroring I'd noticed between the two capitals of the U.S. War of Rebellion (to employ General Grant's nomenclature for it).  It was so extensive that both commanders in chiefs' families lost a dear child while in their White Houses.

McPherson approaches his subject non-polemically. So much so, the study comes across as detached from the matters at hand, which, so far, has left me, at least, wondering why he bothered?  McPherson hasn't had anything new to add to the tale of Jeff Davis, the never reconstructed, never asking pardon, representative par excellence for the Glorious Lost Cause -- which Jeff Davis did so much to create as a polemic that ruled our historic thinking about the war of southern rebellion until the last three decades or so.

Studying these matters within this current political climate of, at best, irresponsible rhetoric, incompetence and corruption is enough all by itself to depress a person.  It doesn't need a flu shot reaction or even the imminent, projected death of an old friend to provoke it.

Peter Lovesey: Peter Diamond, The Stone Wife + The Last Detective

Surely readers who enjoy mysteries, policiers, and other fiction within thus general genre, have long known of Peter Lovesey.  I'm the outlier, who didn't until his latest installment in the Peter Diamond series was published this fall.  I

read a review of The Stone Wife,it sounded the kind of mystery I'd enjoy because the reviewer mentioned that Lovesey stuffs these novels with literary allusions,

and the location is Somerset, Avon and the city of Bath. The Stone Wife's nests of plotting are built around Chaucer, and his best-known character, the Wife of Bath.

Diamond is old-fashioned, far from the haunted, past-obsessed, old rock/jazz/classic music fan, alcoholic, poetry writer, aristo that have become the formulaic patterns of homicide investigators -- not to mention the number of Regency aristos uncovering their peers' secret evils, or the troops of troubled honorable Victorian investigators uncovering the dastardly deeds of the Empire's upper classes. * Lovesey has his own Victorian investigator Sergeant Cribb, btw.

"Gum shoe," is how corpulent, rumpled Diamond thinks of himself.  I think of him as "bull dog."  Perhaps even the classic English bull dog, as he's so retro. He gets an idea in his head about who did it and he won't let go until he gets a confession that indeed that's who done it. This gets him in trouble.

There are twelve Peter Diamond titles between The Stone Wife (2014), and the first Diamond, The Last Detective (1991). It's my current work-out book, so I hear installments one day of The Last Detective, and then the next night I read the next pages of The Stone Wife.

A great deal has happened to the world, to Bath, to Diamond during the course of the intervening twelve novels.  That I don't know the details isn't detracting from my enjoyment in either novel.

The Last Detective is set in the 1980's.  Jane Austen is a huge plot device.  Bath is no longer to be referred to as the Town of Bath, but the City of Bath. Computer database access, DNA testing as part of any forensics investigation are entering policing like a tidal wave, accompanied by official policies to prevent police violence and harassment, racism and sexism. How Somerset and Avon's Detective Superintendent Diamond, views these protocols can be inferred from the title, The Last Detective. Well into the 21st century, judging by The Stone Wife, Diamond remains an unreconstructed police of the old school.

Lovesey has written other mystery series -- all together he's published more than thirty books, despite beginning his writing career later than many successful writers do. He's won several crime fiction awards.  His Victorian London plain clothes Sergeant Cribb became a television series in 1979 - 1981.

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*  Though let me haste to say I have enjoyed these detectives very much, from Rebus, Dalgliesh and Lynley, not to mention Jane Tennison and Vera Stanhope.

American writers who happen to be women seem to do this differently, as with with Baltimore's Laura Lippman's Tess Moneghan, or Montreal's Louise Penny's Chief Inspector Gamache)

Elizabeth Gaskell's Home Reopened

Victorian novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell is the author of works that still appeal today to certain sorts of readers (including myself): North and South, Wives and Daughters, Cranford. These three have been adapted as eminently watchable television series.

Further, many lovers of the history of the novel in English are grateful to Mrs. Gaskell for writing the posthumous biography of her dear friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857 -- first edition).

However, not everyone is / was pleased with this biography, particularly once the previous century's second-wave feminism emerged.  21st century's fannish approaches to literary criticism, reviewing, writing and reading particularly perceive Gaskell's biography as a repellent sanitation of Brontë, patron saint of victimized women of passion in possession of the specialness gene.

Plymouth House,  121 Upper Rumford Street, to which the Gaskells moved in 1842 from a slightly smaller house in the same district, in which they'd lived since 1832.

Plymouth House today, restored.

Could this sort of feminist quarreling have contributed to the 20-year struggle to preserve and restore Gaskell's home? Having re-read Gaskell's biography of the author of Jane Eyre several times at different periods of my own life, it feels to me as though the writer of the linked-to essay is willfully misreading the work -- in order to view Ms Brontë through her own lens of desire that reduces all literature and other entertainments to "doing it!" fast and furious and often, preferably with the ripping of the clothes off. But that's why we keep writing about these writers, because we have different perspectives.

Plymouth House is located in Ardwick, which by the mid-nineteenth century, had become a "pleasant and wealthy" suburb of Manchester, Manchester, which was a cradle of English industrialization. This proximity to the horrors to which factory workers were subject provoked Gaskell' s sensibility to write with such sensitivity on what were then called social subjects, as with her successful novel, North and South.

Complete story in the Manchester Evening News, here.

And more here in the UK Guardian.