Gay Pride Weekend, Weather, Refugees and Immigrants, & History

     . . . . Hot, very. Not so sunny though, and the predicted t-storm has arrived, thank goodness.  We've had no rain for all of June.  Drought has arrived I think.

~~~~~~~~~

Nothing can stop LGBTQ from Priding the last weekend of June in NYC. Big gathering going on at Washington Square Park, in concert with a BLM protest as well. Funny.  All was peaceful.  Then cops arrived.  Squadrons of cops.

~~~~~~~~~

It has been commented at Charlie Stross's place, where many commentators are hooked into EU news far more widely and closely than I am, that the EU policy of excluding entry of US tourists isn't so much about the plague as it is to keep US refugees from coming to Europe. Which ends up being quite a lot the same thing, as NYers ran dragging the virus with them to Florida, etc., and now are running back to NY dragging covid-19 with them this direction.  But the EU certainly don't want the MAGA mad cohort coming in to swell their own numbers of crazy.  But more than that, the way the US has just stopped even trying to deal with the pandemic, and that this huge number of deathcultists are screaming that mask-wearing is satan's signature, things are going to be so insane here by January -- not to mention shortages and all the rest -- that again, merkins will want to hide from it in Europe.  Not having that! the EU says.

~~~~~~~~~

Finished Alaric the Goth: An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome (2020) by Douglas Boin. Maybe I have a handle finally on what the differences are between a hun, a goth and a vandal. The book's structure and organization was confusing and the content felt very thin, despite the author's hitting the keys relentlessly on his theme, that Alaric's ultimate reason for bringing and army into Rome for 3 days was that Rome was disdainful of outsiders and immigrants, denying advancement and acceptance of him even in the army to which he'd given so much. The reviews made the book sound better and more important than it was. But then what do we know about either Alaric or the era that begins toward the close of the 4th C A.D. opening into the 5th and 6th centuries? My real take-away is that the initiation of what we call(ed) the Dark Ages comes when the Christians in the west are dominating Western Rome and tolerance of any kind they WILL NOT TOLERATE! To be sure the author didn't say that, that is what I am taking away.

Now I've begun another history (besides the ongoing ones that are huge and that I don't read in every day): Charles King's 2014 work, Midnight at the Pera Palace: The Birth of Modern Istanbul. This is another of Constantinople-Istanbul's many eras of many diverse immigrants renewing the city.  It's also Jazz Age Istanbul, which Istanbul had enthusiastically, complete with myriads of jazz bands.  Agatha Christie saw it all, visiting Istanbul several times in this era. She did ride the Orient Express, inspiring one of her most famous works, Murder on the Orient Express, among other works of hers that are set at least partly in Istanbul. This is the era in which the Orient Express is created, the surprise and awe of all of Europe.  As per usual, I am struck hard all over again by the mirroring of Venice and Constantinople-Istanbul, not only in their architecture, but their trajectories as trading empires and their intimately shared past.

Today's Thoughts Include Edith Wharton

    . . . . Since my first reading of Age of Innocence, accomplished long after its initial publication in 1920, but chronologically set in the author's past of 1870's Gilded age New York, Edith Wharton has  high on my personal canon of fiction that never goes stale, whatever age we are in or whatever age we are when first reading it and re-reading it thereafter.

Devouring Age of Innocence, in which the destruction is merely bitter-sweet, I turned to The House of Mirth, set in the Gilded Age, which was still in effect in 1905, when it was first published. 

O the bitterness, the waste of a life -- a talented, struggling, isolated woman's life -- the sheer awe-fullness of it, eclipsed anything I'd read up that time, other than in George Eliot.  There was nothing warm about the people of this book other than the protagonist's fire to not be what she was condemned to be.

So, these quoted words of Wharton concerning centering a frivolous, useless society in one's writing resonate magnificently in the past, the present, and if there shall be one, no doubt in the future too.

Wharton had already written books including a novel set in 18th-century Italy and a volume on interior design when she began drafting a novel set in the rarefied world of moneyed New York. The challenge, she recalls in A Backward Glance, was to find the gravitas in such a world. “The answer was that a frivolous society can acquire dramatic significance only through what its frivolity destroys. Its tragic implication lies in its power of debasing people and ideals. The answer, in short, was my heroine, Lily Bart.”

Presently we daily witness and experience ourselves, we who aren't members in our neo-Gilded Age class of heartlessly frivolous powerful and obscenely wealthy, the destruction they wreak upon us and the planet.

No wonder Dominick Dunne, one of our own literary chroniclers of the descendants of Wharton's people and those who came and come up to elbow them aside, named his novel, Too Much Money (2009), after them.