Sunny, Warm Interregnum

      . . . . For the first time since sometime in December, when Omicron arrived, here is unaccustomed cheerfulness. The day began early, with stepping into the outdoors, into sun and warmth. Today's an interregnum after a stretch of below freezing days, and prior to the plunge into single digit temps for the weekend, plus a wind, snow, then rain storm into Monday and temperatures below freezing for the coming week.  

Dashed out wearing the respiratory N95 -- no fogged glasses! --  to TJ's, first thing, in hopes of an emptier store.  Late in the morning I danced out to the library, for another armload of mysteries, just in time for the freeze. Followed up with a big shopping at MW, this time el V with me for the carrying.  

Everybody is masked up, even on the street -- the tourists must have gone home. We've all been hunkering in self-imposed isolation, our sort of NYCers anyway, due to the Omicron forest fire, and the cold, so we're all running around today to stock up on more groceries, for the next week of  bunkering against the cold, and in the likely case of borked supply chains due to weather.  Today, though, anything one wants and needs are on the neatly stocked shelves. I do hear though, from the elderly in our building and others, what can be harder to get -- meaning, so far, only they've had to wait, are prescription medications.  As for groceries, I've been hearing our persent, local, good fortune isn't shared everywhere across the country.

They Are Saying that maybe Omicron's peaking here?  We should be so lucky, since before Christmas. everyday we were told of at least one more person we know down with it, or someone calling with the news, "Family member/s/me positive and / or down with it."

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     . . . . People elsewhere are also in self-isolation. 

Tonight's the first Postmambo Movie Night of 2022; Postmamboists across the country are saying, "Thank God! We're going crazy shut-in."  Tonight's program is NOLA Reconnect/Postmambo's first one of 2022.

Presiding, via Zoom, is Dr. Elizabeth McAlister, author of Rara! Vodou, Power, and Performance in Haiti and Its Diaspora:

 

Funerary Rites in Haitian Vodou

Honoring Frisner Augustin, Legendary Priest of the Drum

. . . . The second January Postmambo Movie Night is Thursday, January 20, 8 p.m. Eastern. 

In honor of the Jack Kerouac centennial, Postmambo Movie Night presents Pull My Daisy (Robert Frank, 1959)."We'll talk to the film's composer, David Amram, who sat next to Kerouac in the studio as he improvised the voice-over narration. David is still gigging at the age of 91! We'll talk with him about his scores for The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass, his friendship with Thelonius Monk, his visit to then-forbidden Cuba on the path-breaking 1977 "jazz cruise," and lots more."

Here are some, not all, of our recent NOLA Reconnect Sessions

Dec. 9: Richard Morse with Dr. Elizabeth McAlister

Nov. 11: Erol Josué with Dr. Elizabeth McAlister

Oct. 31: Jean-Daniel Lafontant live from Temple Na-Ri-Vèh on Fèt Gède

Oct. 31: C. Daniel Dawson

Oct. 14: Paul Beaubrun with Dr. Elizabeth McAlister

Sep. 13: A Conversation with Dr. Ivor Miller

Aug. 12: Rafael Delgadillo on 19th-century New Orleans

July 8: Gianluca Tramontana and Dr. Ben Lapidus on changüí

"Life Changing!" has become one of the most common responses to the Postmambo/NOLA Reconnect experiences, despite Zoom!

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P.S.  El V has become a convert to toast, via my sour dough bread discovery.  He wants toast with everything! 

It's Still Goin' On! The January That Refuses To Take Its Leave

      . . . . Every day and every night gets colder.  Every morning I wake up to a temperature lower than the one with which we got up yesterday.  We're now in the zone of below freezing day and night, and at night, way below freezing, though we haven't yet hit single digits.

The insurrection continues, with threats to the lives and well being of various Democrats in the House and Senate, even made by members of the chambers out loud and in public -- not to mention everywhere else. They are intent in bringing this all down and establishing an authoritarian white supremacist, radically religiously intolerant nationalism instead.

Chaos with vaccines here and everywhere else, when it comes to manufacture, administration and distribution. 

Still engaged in transferring / copying data to the Desktop. This doesn't mean I've been laggard about it, rather there's a lot of other things more urgent to do all the time, and once a day's rota of those tasks have been completed, I'm not in the mood to keep watch on whether a data base has paused its download, completely downloaded, or whether it has transferred / uploaded successfully to the Desktop.  I am looking forward to having this finished though, so I can change the display on the desktop screen to one of my own photos.  But right now One Drive is uploading all the files and folders to itself from my hard drive, so this computer hardly functions.  But it should, considering how much bandwidth we have and the speed measurement.  But there ya are -- still stalling out.

Why yes, one can find oneself really hating computers and the digital universe.

As always, the end of the day, is good part of the day!  We've embarked upon a new book, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (2019), by Julius Scott.  Incorporating content from his dissertation, Scott wrote it after receiving his doctorate from Duke in 1989. It didn't find a publisher though, until recently. 

As seen in the Penguin-Verso press release, among the book's admirers are quite a few scholars I also admire deeply, such as Marcus Rediker:

ABOUT THE COMMON WIND

Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History

A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era

The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.

By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved.

Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

Tonight, it's The Dig, a Netflix film that released today.

The Dig is a drama film directed by Simon Stone, based on the 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston, which reimagines the events of the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo. It stars Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, Johnny Flynn, Ben Chaplin, Ken Stott, Archie Barnes and Monica Dolan.

If you are not familiar with Sutton Hoo, here is the website for what is still and active dig, as well as museum.

As mentioned above the cold here is severe and evidently plans to be in residence in our region for quite some time, at least into next week.  There is going to be a lot of snow too, it seems, starting sometime Sunday? all through the mid-Atlantic. Have no idea how much we should expect here.  But as cold as it is, we may get more snow than rain this round.  This is the weather for which was made the Finnish wool cape el V brought back to me from a European tour some years back.  It keeps me comfortable when the steam heat hasn't kicked in for a while.  Excellent for watching 'tv'!

Boston Review Puts TASC in Sydney Mintz Orbit-Obit / Another Counterpunch TASC Review

It gives a funny feeling, on the day before we leave for Cuba that Sydney Mintz has died. And see The American Slave Coast mentioned in the obituary by  Sarah Hill.

My copy of Sweetness and Power, which I still have.

I first read Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985) back in 1989-90, before el V's first trip to Cuba. It helped reshape my way of thinking, of seeing our past, along with Fernand Braudel, co-founder of the French school of history known as the Annales. I got el V to read it asap.

It's an honor to have TASC included in a list of like books, influential titles, that the obit writer clearly sees influenced to greater and lesser degree by the work of Mintz.

Alas the obituary writer left out the name of the other author of The American Slave Coast. This may be the first time this omission has happened.  However, the obit writer knew Prof. Mintz well, and surely is grief-stricken.

In the meantime, Ron Jacobs, author of a new Counterpunch review of The American Slave Coast is outraged. In his final paragraph Jacobs says:

Ned and Constance Sublette have provided the world with one of the best history books ever written about the United States. Nominally about the slave breeding industry in the US South, The American Slave Coast is actually a sweeping, in-depth survey of the nation known as the United States. The authors skilfully blend economics, politics, military history and personal narratives into a history volume that stands among the best ever published. Written with an eye on the present–a present where the case of Tamir Rice is but one of hundreds–it is a history with a weight that will never began to be thrown off until it is understood with the same honesty it is told in The American Slave Coast.

It's Officially Published Today! The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

So far we're having an incredible experience, meeting up with old friends, getting to know newer friends better, and meeting brand new friends, all of whom are exciting, brilliant and filled with stimulating knowledge they are eager to share.

The Watson Institute Presents A Cuban Music Festival

Thursday, October 1

Recording session with musicians at the Granoff Center for the Arts, 154 Angell Street, 11 a.m.

Ned Sublette presents: “El paquete, or, the present moment in Cuban music: a descarga.” Talk in Kim Koo Library, 4 p.m. Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street

Festival Welcome Dinner hosted by Richard Snyder, The Dorrance (restaurant), 60 Dorrance Street, 6:30 p.m.

Afro-Cuban Rumba Party, 9 p.m. The Spot Underground, 180 Pine Street. Pedrito Martínez, Román Díaz, Philbert Armenteros, more.

Today is the pub date for The American Slave Coast!

And tomorrow (Oct. 2) at 5 p.m., Ned and Constance will hold the first of many author events for the book, also at Brown (what a great place to launch), at the Joukowsky Forum, Watson Institute, 111 Thayer Street.

Much more to come.