Not Wednesday, But It Is A New Month, So Here Are A Few Books

     . . . .  Essex Dogs (2023)  by Dan Jenkins is the first in a projected trilogy set in one of my perennial eras of fascination, the 14th century. Jenkins has written many popular histories of the middle ages, many of which I've read, without being impressed; he's also written-narrated on camera quite a few history progammes for Brit tv.  This is his first foray into fiction. 

This first novel follows one very small troop of hired fighters -- the Essex Dogs of the title -- from the 1346 Normandy Beach landing, through this particular French campaign, to its conclusion with the Battle of Crécy.  So, the part of story of King Edward III I’m interested in primarily, the role the Black Death played in the War starting in 1348 and thereafter, particularly how the English monarchy handled the effects of the Great Pestilence, is not here. 

What we've got is the sort of debunking of the chivalry and prowess on the field and leadership with which we are all deeply familiar, at least in fiction, since at least the days of Glenn Cook and Abercrombie. OPn the other hand, let's be honest here: being a monarch, or merely a member of a monarch's family, is to be a monster. It cannot be helped.  Part of this debunking chivalry is the theme of what a twit, turd, and creep is the Black Prince, showing him as a thoroughly horrible youth not in least above raping and further degrading peasant girls. This goes against what contemporaries and chroniclers have written of him:  

"Contemporaries praised the Black Prince's chivalrous character, in particular his modesty, courage and courtesy on the battlefield. According to the medieval chronicler Jean Froissart, after the battle the Black Prince held a banquet in honour of the captured king and served him dinner.

No one can ever say that the practice of chevauchee was ever anything but brutal in the extreme, destroying everything in the path, including ethics, morals, compassion, honor and that phantasm, chivalry:

Even in his lifetime, contemporaries challenged the Black Prince’s heroic image, recasting him as a villain. Criticism focused on his chevauchée raiding expedition [-- Me here: 'raiding expedition' mildly describes the murder, pillage, rape, burning and destroying everything within as 20 mile radius of the army's passage --but never fear, the novel revels in describing these matters, in detail, as Our Dogs do indeed participate.] in France in 1355–56, a brutal affair designed to demoralise the enemy. Starting in Bordeaux in September 1355, Edward moved across France passing Toulouse, Carcassonne and Narbonne. He focused his attention on towns where he could inflict the most damage with the least resistance. His troops looted, burned property and killed inhabitants. On campaign with the Black Prince in 1355, Sir John Wingfield wrote a letter to the bishop of Winchester proclaiming that “there was never such loss nor destruction as hath been in this raid”.

This novel is as gritty as it gets, i.e. gritty for gritty's sake – how many detailed phlegm balls are hawked on every page? It was neither interesting or revelatory.  It may be fiction but we’ve seen all of it depicted in novels many, many times before, and we know this first invasion of France by Edward III was successful, if only by the hair of winning at Crécy. Jones has a Name, has written many books of popular history, and television programs, but there is no fictional narrative drive, pacing or voice to this first novel by a guy who hasn’t written fiction before.  On the other hand, this novel details this “road to ruin for both England and France” as The Spectator’s reviewer labeled this 1346 campaign, the initiation of what became the 100 Years War -- though truly, the war began quite a few years earlier than 1346, at least as early as the Battle of Sluys, 1340 -- or even earlier.

Jones tells us he got the idea for how the book should work from a dinner with GRRM.

It was an interesting experience though, reading the fictional Essex Dogs by night, and three times a week working out to the audio version of  Ian Mortimer's Edward III: The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation (2006).  I've read biographies of Edward III by other authors, who admire him for many reasons, while providing a fair judgment of the shortcomings, or downright evils that may have been committed -- though which is which, contemporaries, posterity and historians do not necessary agree to.

Myself am suspicious of Mortimor’s claims that Edward II wasn’t executed, but lived on as a wanderer for another decade + in Europe. I also admit to being skeptical regarding Edward III's expenditures on luxuries of every kind, including dressing people for the earlier decades' endless tournies being excused as necessary PR for the Crown of England who also must project an aura as the ultimate badass warrior king, rather than as bad for England as well as for the war -- I mean the expenditure is even more astounding than the accounts of what the Queen Mother spent purely on luxurious living, decade after decade, including her racing stables -- every year Queen Elizabeth had to pay off her mother's debts. Mortimer (one wonders: distant relative of the Mortimer family who highjacked Edward II's crown?) excuses his order to behead his uncle, the Duke of Kent, as something he had no choice about – that in particular, I’m not buying, since in a matter of less than a half year Edward III and his supporters arrested Mortimer and executed him.

Alas though, this biography doesn't answer my perennial question, which is how in the world were France, particularly, and England also, keep fielding armies for this war when the Great Mortality returns time and time and time again, crops can't be planted, or if they are the English burn them or steal them so famine stalks France. Where are the fighting men coming from -- particularly when so many French nobles are killed at the same time in such military disasters as Crécy and Poitiers? The plague came back to England too, crops weren't planted and / or the weather destroyed them, yet somehow Edward III manages to keep getting ever increasing taxation passed to fund his wars, while so many die and go hungry.

The writers / historians I've read haven't mentioned the supreme irony that Edward III, the supreme King of Chivalry, identifying himself and his court with mythical King Arthur, chivalry's values, and performative, at least, practices, was the European king to dethrone the traditional  aristo knight in shining armor as skilled swordsman and horse rider, by funding and encouraging in every way projectile weapons, from the long bow to gunpowder and cannon.  They Do Say there were early cannon used at Crécy.

Balancing out some of the lacks as perceived in Mortimer's biography of Edward III, are his frequent citations of the rather astonishing number of successful and effective warrior noblewomen that populate the 14th century, such as Joanna of Flanders.  Isabella of 15th C Spain did not come out of a vacuum.

     . . . . Two other books, one a novel, also written by a successful screen writer and director, as well authentically a novelist, John Sayles, and the other non-fiction as well, but these two are centuries apart:

John Sayles Delivers Epic Battles and Travels in a New Novel

“Jamie MacGillivray” gives readers a sweeping tour of 18th-century history, from Scotland to the American Colonies.

The reviews are quite good.

Then to the 19th century New York City:

MADAME RESTELL: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of Old New York’s Most Fabulous, Fearless, and Infamous Abortionist (2023) by Jennifer Wright.

The title tells us what we need to know, which includes how pertinent this book is today, as the good people, male doctors killing women giving birth because they thought it cool to go from working with a corpse in a mortuary to deliver a baby, men just generally, of course, but particularly Anthony Comstock, battle to make this woman stop helping women.  Fascinatingly, at the end, when she's to be arrested, she commits suicide.  But, the author asks, "Did that happen? Or did she fake the suicide and escape, as for years her family hinted?

Let's Read Again Like We Did Last Year ~~

      . . . . Frequently my mind fails to make sense to me. 

 How did I manage to choose Bagehot: The Life and Times of the Greatest Victorian (2019) by James Grant as the audio book to follow Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (2016) by Laura Spinney, and The Zealot and the Emancipator: John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, and the Struggle for American Freedom (2020) by H. W. Brands for my workouts?

So far my great take-away is that Bagehot was not only a prototype of what we in later times tend to call a libertarian / neo liberal.  He formalized the concept, and described in detail  the necessity of a Central Bank and its functions for a stable government.  He did the same for Constitutional Monarchy. This while, though they benefit from both, the 'lower orders,' the poor, the uneducated, are incapable of understanding either economics or constitutions, and certainly lack the capacity for making political and governing decisions. Needless to say that women as a class aren't even that much of a consideration, despite his respect for the intellects of many of the women of his acquaintance, including his own mother, who also suffered serious mental illness.

This brilliant fellow, a prodigy already as a very young child, could not add or subtract. Yet his family put him in charge the family banking business, when he hated everything else including the law for which he qualified among his many other professional credentials, realizing he wouldn't be able to pull a Disraeli and move from writing to holding office and becoming Prime Minister. The family business's great fortune is that he seems to have spent more time doing anything but banking, while remaining a writing demon as to output, and a polymath in terms of what he wrote about. Naturally, due to his writing about how to run a country's finances, he got sent to India to put its finances on solid footing.  How more British and Victorian than this may we get?

Bagehot was praised for cool wit and epigrammatic style, which author Grant does his best to exhibit in his own economic writing. Nor did Bagehot stint in praise for himself in his own writing, knowing he knew what others did not, and taking knowingly contrary political positions such as favoring Louis-Philippe's coup against the election and naming himself France's ruler for life. Bagehot inevitably reminds this reader of that thoroughly self-satisfied, thoroughly knowledgeable of his own superiority, that fellow likely only Tories today recall, William F. Buckley.

On the other hand, George Eliot quite adored Bagehot as a thinker and his friend.  But no one has suggested George Eliot didn't have a strong conservative bent herself -- except for herself, of course.

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Things do roll on, don't they. The period's royalties arrived, and so did spring, while winter, hopefully, is now departed for months.  El V got his second dose of Pfizer this afternoon.  He's currently lying down, but he generally feels sleepy before dinner so it probably means nothing.  I am making dinner, looking forward to my second dose of Moderna late Friday afternoon, and after dinner, I'm particularly looking forward to the HBO Max premiere of  the 4-part Exterminate All the Brutes.

In ‘Exterminate All the Brutes,’ Raoul Peck Takes Aim at White Supremacy

After the success of “I Am Not Your Negro,” HBO gave Peck carte blanche for his next big project. What resulted is a sweeping meditation on colonialism and the nature of truth itself. ... New York Times

Raoul Peck’s four-hour documentary for HBO is a dizzying retelling of the course of colonialism, slavery and genocide. ... New York Times

"....a Radical Masterpiece About White Supremacy, Violence and the History of the West" ... Time

This exploration of the "origin story of white supremacy" features two Revelators who have had deep effect on both el V's and my historical researches and formation of our historical perspective:  

" .... It takes its title from Swedish historian Sven Lindqvist’s ruminative 1992 book about his travels through postcolonial Africa, which in turn wrestles with the source of the quote “exterminate all the brutes”: Joseph Conrad’s immortal novella Heart of Darkness. Peck also draws heavily on historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous People’s History of the United States and Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing the Past: The Power and Production of History. In each episode, he credits himself as having made the series “together with” all three scholars, even though Trouillot died in 2012 and Lindqvist in 2019."

Seeing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz involved in this already highly praised non-dramatic, history series, feels particularly personal since she accepted on our behalf and read our "Thank you very much for this honor" for the 2016 American Book Award for The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry, as we weren't able to make it out to California for the event.  But it's particularly satisfying because Dunbar-Ortiz is a true pioneer of this kind of work.  When she began, it didn't exist, within or without academia.  Now, because of hers and others devoting their lives to inventing a methodology to study and recover history that has been both disappeared and denied, to see her, at her age, receiving this kind of recognition is truly exciting.

A quote from Michel-Rolph Trouillot is at the top of this Fox Home blog, as it has since the beginning.

February, Black and Red: Black History Month and Valentine's - But Not Yet

     . . . . Storm barreling down on us, They Warn, bringing 12 - 14 inches of snow and wind / gusts reaching 45 mph, beginning this evening and continuing into Tuesday.  And cold, which it already is and has been, for days.  Did I mention cold?  The wind will make the cold felt even more so.  As this storm will delay vaccine deliveries, distribution and administration even more, it will delay other deliveries too, as to our supermarkets.  It covers midwestern regions on one of the divided atmospheric branches, and the mid-Atlantic, into New England and beyond.  Hope everyone has a enough milk on hand for all the hot tea, hot chocolate and coffee we'll be drinking. 

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Let's begin with good stuff.  Since my photo archive is now available on the desktop, I get to choose a screen wall paper photo to replace that hideous bloat of HP's umbrella display  Ultimately I picked a photo of part of the battlement and tower complex around the Avignon Palais des Papes by night. Such happy memories flooding through the mind's eye, browsing through the archive of photos from Southern France.

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A darling GameStop story!

 ....The fifth grader was gifted 10 GameStop shares, each at $6.19, as a Kwanzaa present from his mother in December 2019. She bought the stock simply because her son liked to buy video games at the store and she wanted to teach him a little about the stock market.

In a matter of minutes this week, Jaydyn Carr became an unexpected beneficiary of the market mayhem, as his $60 stake in the video game retailer grew to $3,200....

....When Carr bought the 10 GameStop shares in 2019 as a Kwanzaa gift, she certainly did not anticipate the value would one day spontaneously soar, she said. Her sole intention in purchasing the stock was to teach her then-eight-year-old son about Ujamaa, which means, “cooperative economics.” It’s one of the seven principles of Kwanzaa.

“The goal was to ensure he knows the value of a dollar and how to manage money,” Carr said, explaining that Ujamaa is the idea of sharing wealth, while also strengthening personal finances and self-reliance....

The story has a more than happy ending too!

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Black Lives Matter has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.  It already has won Sweden's Olof Palme human rights prize for 2020.

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I just finished with The Habsburgs: To Rule the World (2020) by Martyn Rady

Perhaps the favorite thing I took from this book was hearing monasteries referred to as "prayer factories."  

Among the vital information is Austria and the Habsburg's deep involvement and facilitator of the eastern African slave trade to the Ottomans, and the western Atlantic slave trade, via Portugal, to the New World.  In case one isn't aware of how this landlocked empire could do such a thing, here is the explanation (this era has long been one of el V's favorite go-tos when it comes to the history of Cuba and Latin America, by the way.

Charles V, who became King of Spain in 1516 and was elected emperor in 1519, had as his motto “plus ultra”, meaning “still further”. In the 16th and 17th centuries Habsburg power spread across the globe, with the dynasty establishing a presence in sites from Brazil, Mexico and Peru to Goa, the Philippines and Taiwan, at the same time as their forces fought for dominance against those of the Ottoman sultans to the east. In 1700 Habsburg power came to an end in Spain and its associated territories, but the central European branch of the family would remain a pre-eminent force for two centuries yet.

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The Dig takes place in 1939, at what becomes called the site of Sutton Hoo.  Watched while WWII era pop musics played on a radio in the other room leaked into the headphones through which I was hearing the film.

We travel to the dead, and the dead travel to us.  Time slips when we confronted palpable evidence of the past such as fingerprints in paint, paint applied by the hands thousands of years ago. 

We begin with images of Ancient Egyptian rulers' images in a book read by one of the protagonists. We conclude with the reburial of the excavation of the anglo-saxon ship to protect the dig site from WWII's aerial blitz.  Throughout is threaded the child's enthralled imaginative play with space travel. The child effortlessly holds the past, the present and future simultaneously. The site's invading Saxons' ship enthralls him as much as his imagined space invaders' ships, while he carries the present-day concern for his mother's ill-health, and those whom loves are called to fight the nazis.  Invasion, past, present and future, all at once.

The scripted drama gives us the heroes of archaeology, those who have been lost and written out of the discoveries. The vast inequalities of social and class division, the imposed hierarchy imposed upon the site, mirror those of society at large, past and present. This is a story of some of those and how they are the ones who made the Sutton Hoo discoveries: the non-wealthy, those lacking formal academic bestowed degrees, women, those who are classed as "merely laborers,", yet without whom nothing can be done, whenever then is, whenever now is, whether building the pyramids or rediscovering them. These who tend to be forgotten or written out of history even as they were the history movers and shakers.

Even entire groups who historically were movers and shakers, creators of history that we study, can be written mostly out. Merovingian!  They said the word Merovingian and Merovingians!  Merovingian objects in grave ship's burial chamber.  Now this is unlikely to have had the same electrifying effect on other watchers -- see, written out of history -- but it sure did on this one, a Merovingian watcher if there ever was one.  

Now I want a cat or dog, so I can name him or her Basil Brown. after the character played by Ralph Fiennes.  I will call dog or cat, Baz.

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Now, coming to the history of the United States: as part of leading the therapeutic treatment for the Members hunted and threatened during the armed 01/06  Insurrection,  Nancy Pelosi has requested each one to write an essay detailing their experience of that day. 

“Be your own historian, be part of writing the history of this, because there’s nobody who can be a better validator of what happened in your experience than you,” Pelosi said . . . .

Pelosi leading trauma therapy for the members in the 01/06 armed attack insurrection.  Part of this is having each one write an historical essay of their experience.  

Among other news is there's a bullet shortage as reported to us by friends in places like New Orleans.  When they went to get ammo, after going through the paper work for legal purchase, registration and concealed carry, they went to the places where one buys ammunition.  They are out of supply.

One does fear very much the next armed attack in D.C. will be during the impeachment trial.  This shyte ain't over; the shooting civil war is just getting going.

And it's still January!

Covid-19 Vaccination(s) Comng Soon To An Undisclosed Location Near You! / Reading Wednesday

      . . . .  Governor announced vaccine arrival in our state  by December 15th, so surely to all the other states too?

The sooner the better, but there's a really long time to go, a really long time.  Also, recall, it seems no matter which Big Pharma created the vaccine one is to receive, two shots are necessary to be protected (nobody knows for how long the protection will be effective, but most likely we'll have to do this at least every 12 months).

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today that New York's first Pfizer vaccine delivery is expected to come on December 15th, and will be enough doses for 170,000 New Yorkers. [Which means, since each vaccination to be effective must be administered twice, for about 85,000 NYers.]

A second round of 170,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which will constitute the second dosage for those designated people, will arrive 21 days later. The state is expecting additional allocations of the Pfizer vaccine, as well as the Moderna vaccine, later in the month or in early January as well.

Cuomo added that by the end of December, the Trump administration suggests there will be enough to vaccinate another 20 million people with two dosages across the country, making up 6% of the population of the United States.

Per CDC recommendations, New York's vaccination program will prioritize healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in phase one. There are approximately 85,000 nursing home residents and 130,000 nursing home staff members in New York, so the first round of vaccines will not cover all of those people. Cuomo hopes that the second round of vaccines later in the month will at least cover that entire group of 210,000+ people....

Keep in mind, please, this date is for arrival of vaccine -- though since it seems necessary it needs to be kept super-cold, They should probably being going to work immediately.

But will they?

 So it not only does distribution mean jabbing people, but paperwork so they can be jabbed three weeks? two weeks? later, again.  Records must be kept!  Recall, my state is still counting ballots from the election last month.  Among the multiple, well, to be honest, uncounted, problems -- piles of ballots from who knows where because the yellow stickies fell off.

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It's Reading Wednesday Somebody/ies Say!  Here is a novel I would recommend for those who are interested in King Arthur and historical fiction set during the Dark Ages.  (Which of course I am interested because so little has been known about these years, but, thanks to archeaology and relentless scholarship, we discover a little more history all the time.

The Lost Queen (2018) was the first installment in Signe Pike's projected trilogy.  The Forgotten Kingdom (2020) is the trilogy's middle volume, and writer's second novel. Unlike many middle volumes, this one is more compelling in terms of both character and action, than the first one.  The writer writes vivid descriptions of the natural world of the setting -- as much as possible she's visited her sites, and what remains of them. The result is that I felt I was seeing what the characters are described as seeing. It is composed around the Arthurian origin mythologies that are centered location-wise in what we now call Scotland -- north of The Wall. The chronology is the later 6th century; the Romans are gone, Angles are 'invading', and to my personal historic thinking, Europe and England already have had nearly a century of the Dark Ages.* The Christian persecutions of the Old Religions in the region has been well underway for decades already. Considering this isn't the Victorian re-imagining of the age, as in Idylls of the King, well, yes, this books does contain brutal, bloody, cruel and abusive scenes.  It wouldn't be right if it did not.  Some victims survive, some do not, and others survive but are forever affected. The writer has good instincts, to do justice, but not dwell or revel.  

*    Why do I persist in calling the eras from late in the 5th Century to maybe the 9th Century and Charlemagne, the Dark Ages? It'such an old-fashioned way to view history, mostly considered out of date for any up to date medieval historian -- rather like maintaining the War of the Rebellion of the USA's 19th century wasn't caused by the issue of slavery, or that Rome 'fell' in the 5th century.  I keep calling these years the Dark Ages  because it was in the 5th century that Christianity became definitively official state religion of Rome, East as well as West, the plagues and famines which came relentlessly, until quite some time later, by which time the 'classical' or 'pagan' worlds had been erased for practical purposes, i.e. official, state, political, legal, religious monopoly by the Church., and things started to get crazy due to Christians determing intolerance of anything not determined by authority -- which led to many slaughters of each other, as well as of 'pagans and all the other Others.

These two Romes did build out from all the classical Roman political and administrative structures -- thus to my mind Rome didn't fall either, buy that didn't stop the Dark Ages of plagues, wars, famines and many other catastrophes. What was left was a shell within which cruel intolerance festered -- kind of like the restaurants here that now rule the streets -- they have been built out of the far more stable structures of the indoor restaurants.  Indeed, they have come to be called, "Streeteateries," (even a step down from 'eateries,' a designation NY food reviewers are fond of) --  and are hit by cars -- frequently.  Still as that was still Rome, people still eat and drink in these flimsy pretenses of fine dining.

The Good Old Days: Reading the Fictional 100 Years War

Doyle, Arthur  Conan (1891) The White Company and Sir Nigel (1906)

     . . . . Both novels are set in the 14th century within the 100 Years War.  But the later published Sir Nigel takes place earlier in the war against the backdrop of the Bubonic Plague.

The White Company, featuring a fictionalized mercenary company, under  the command of of the fictional Nigel Loring (modeled on the Prince's Neil Loring), is an historical novel of the Black Prince's Trastámara campaign, forced on him by his father, Edward III. Historically, this campaign broke the Black Prince's non-stop winning streak in place since his heroism at Crécy, broke his finances (his own habits helped, of course), and destroyed his health. Here began one of the declines of England's fortunes in France during this endless conflict.

This is the campaign of the famous historical Battle of Nájera, the campaign where Geoffrey Chaucer, the great English poet, was present, at least at the start, during the organization in the small Navarrese city of Olite, in the Pyrenees.  It was a catastrophic venture, because Edward III, falling into dotage, ordered his son to make it, without consideration of any of the realities on the ground, where King Edward wasn't present.  Edward III wanted the usurping but much saner and superior figure, the bastard brother Henry Trastámara, removed from the throne of Castile and replaced with the insane, corrupt, cruel but legitimately birthed scion (the Black Prince knew all this), Don Pedro. The Prince was never healthy again, which meant leaving the kingdom in England and France to an infant who grew up feckless and so we are all about the Wars of the Roses rolling afterward.

When I read The White Company as an undergraduate, I knew none of this history or geography. 

Even now, I find it annoying that for many chapters 'the prince' is referred to only as that, rather than as the Prince of Wales or even the Black Prince, which would have given this ignoramous some kind of chronological marker.  John Chandos figures in both of Doyle's 14th century novels, and I had no idea who he was either.  (But then, I didn't know who Froissart was either, who is one of the primary foundations for the study of the 14th century of England and France!  I mention this because I get such a kick out of knowing I learned what I didn't know then!)  It really frustrated me back then that The White Company wasn't what Barringer's Nuestra fantasy history was -- where I didn't need to know who anybody was, because none of it was history, except, to a degree, the idealized version of the 14th century's aristo chivalric view of itself, culturally and socially, that the class expected the entire social and economic strata to accept.

I found Barringer's trilogy around the same time I found The White Company.

So it was other historical fiction progenitor and progeny I've been considering most while reading these 14th century historical novels of Doyle's. Closes to his period was Leslie Barringer's 14th century historical fantasy trilogy, The Nuestrian Cycle. These were published more than two decades after Doyle's. Like Doyle's, Barringer's first volume of the trilogy opens with a primary figure-protagonist in a monastery, from which both are expelled due to family necessity.

Out earlier historical fiction, I noticed how much The White Company owes to the father of historical fiction, Sir Walter Scott, in his opening pages of Ivanhoe, though it takes place in the highly fictionalised 12th century. The romance tropes Scott initiated in this, his first work composed entirely of English subjects, are in full view in the earlier section of The White Company, particularly including as a featured hero, one descended of of the Saxon line as is the knight, Ivanhoe. 

While reading Doyle's books, though nearly 100% certain it didn't happen, I've been amusing myself with the idea it isn't beyond the realms of possibility at some point, Doyle, Kipling, Owen Wister, H. Rider Haggard and Theodore Roosevelt had dinner together. Owen Wister was a life-long friend of TR's, dedicating The Virginian to him. Both were Harvard men; TR's mother was a Georgian unreconstructed plantation belle, and Wister's mother was the daughter of Pearce Meese Butler, the largest slave owner in the south).  TR knew Haggard and Kipling, quite well too, and like Wister, they even spent some time with him in the White House.  In the run-up to WWI TR and Kipling were in close contact -- both snapping their teeth to convince the politicos and the public that preventive war with Germany was necessary.

Though he never did meet Arthur Conan Doyle, "When Doyle engineered his [Holmes's] return, Theodore Roosevelt sent word to him that a guest room awaited him at the White House."

Edgar Rice Burroughs should be at that dinner too, but maybe he wasn’t of the right class, despite being of the right time. He certainly read TR's On African Game Trails (1910), on his own 1913 visit to Africa. "The New York Times made its first mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs on June 14, 1914, when the paper’s Book Review included Tarzan of the Apes among “One Hundred Books for Summer Reading...." 

The Review's description of the book that follows would have been irresistible to TR except TR was engaged in his own hair-raising jungle adventure in 1914, in the jungles of Brazil, which damned near killed him and should have. One feels that only TR himself could have survived what he survived, with his pre-existing conditions, of a leg wound prone to re-erupting septically, recurrent malaria acquired in Cuba (called doncha know 'the Cuban sickness', overweight and hypertensive.

TR, frequently described as "a great boy" by everyone from his wife, to himself and other politicians, was well known for his love of what was called 'boys' books' of his time, including Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories.  What all these writers have in common, with the possible exception of Leslie Barringer (and Scott), is they were one and all conscious white supremacists,  imperialists who bought into the cult of ‘manliness, race and eugenics,' and that ‘good’ (white) women were owed their protection and respect, and ‘bad’ women were malicious schemers who worked for their enemies. They were indeed, of their time.  Not until the end of the 20th Century would we see again so many supposedly adult men devoted to entertainment that was originally aimed at kids, self-identifying with every sort of superhero, even overtly evil ones.

WWI – and the Great Influenza --was the explosion that shredded that.  So far, not even the novelcorona virus has done that to us. People are just itching to employ their manliness in shooting libs and blacks and feminists and LBGQT people and intellectuals-college-educated-writers-journalists and immigrants and atheists and depending on who and which group(s) among them Catholics and Jews and socialist-commies.  Gosh, people -- don't these manliest of the manly white supremacists look just like the Khmer Rouge?

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Currently reading as well, still in the 14th century, and graduating slowly into the 15th, A.J. Pollard's Late Medieval England 1399-1509 (2000), Hugh Bichino's The Wars of the Roses 1455-1487: The Blood Struggle for England's Throne (2015; 2015), and re-reading for the 4th time, Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur's Chronicler (2005) by Christina Hardyment.

On another topic the book with which I'm deeply engaged is The Haitians: A Decolonial History by Jean Casimir (2020). This is meaty brain food, in the way French-Caribbean intellectual-historians of their world always are, providing viewpoints and conceptualization foreign and shocking to the historians born, bred and trained in the – former? – colonialist power nations.

Lord. How Long. How Long. In the UK Too

     . . . . In an entry Elsewheres, I concluded with "Lord. How long. How Long."  To my astonishment, people asked what that means.   

  . . . . People with a religious background or any experience of protestant, Jewish, African American recognize it immediately.  It's part of US literary tradition by now, in many parts, even recognized within canon.  This is the rhetorical Introduction and Refrain of passionate lamentation over inexplicable suffering and oppression, begging an explanation from God,  of Why, Lord? why at all? Why to me? to us? and for how long, Lord, will you allow this to go on?

Versions of "How Long" are everywhere in the Old Testament, whether in the Book of Habakkuk or the Psalms. It is in protestant hymns and prayers, it is naturally, particularly prevalent in African American religious tradition, whatever the mode of expression, and beyond that has been heard even in pop music made by African Americans and covered by whites, yea, even in the UK -- even when the lamentation is about another band member playing off on the side in secret with another band, as with Ace's one hit wonder.*

So, yes, among the lamentation of African Americans -- and British people of color too, who are at least as religious out of the protestant traditions as in the US, to speak "Lord. How long. How long,' as a response to a white guy doing absolutely nothing for racial justice except to say, ya! go risk your life and health -- go go go! and then demand cookies from god himself (who he is currently referring to as karma points!) for typing that in the comfort of his comfy home and bank account, far far far away from anything remotely threatening, whether the pandemic, eviction, or police brutality, is something very many people immediately 'get', so to speak.

But not this tone deaf white guy -- who also poo pooed  Covid-19 as a cozy disaster that would over in two weeks. Thus, this traditional African American expression in prayer, in sermon-oratory -- see Dr. Martin Luther King

and music, secular and popular, and has been since the early days of slavery -- is appropriate.  How long, Lord, must we put up with clueless complacent white guys  typing clueless, complacent words, and then demanding a reward?

* Another example of how African American traditions get reworked into commentary upon what is happening right this minute can be heard in the soundtracks to both Coppola's Apocalypse Now, and Spike Lee's imminent release, Da 5 Bloods, which comments on our conditions both back in political and film history -- Vietnam -- and that history commenting on contemporary events.

~~~~~~~~~~~

The BLM Protest movement is indeed global. The monument to African slave trader, Edward Colston, in Bristol, on which Bristol's modern fortune was founded, was pulled down. The protest in London by the US embassy is enormous!

https://www.itv.com/news/westcountry/2020-06-07/thousands-attend-black-lives-matter-protest-in-bristol/

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-britain/thousands-join-black-lives-matter-protest-outside-u-s-embassy-in-london-idUSKBN23E0A3?

https://www.itv.com/news/2020-06-07/more-black-lives-matter-protests-to-take-place-across-the-uk-on-sunday/

With horses featuring in stories about the clashes between cops both here 

and the UK, with the horses and the cops in armor, while a pandemic rages, I have no trouble re-visioning the uprisings in the 14th century in England,

particularly the largest, longest one, the Watt Tyler Revolt, or, the Peasants' Uprising, against Richard II -- particularly directed at his uncle, Duke of Lancaster, John of Gaunt -- whose newly built palace, reputed to be the most exquisite in Europe, was not looted, it was destroyed, deliberately, every part of it, from marble wall facings to the smallest bibelot,  ground to shards and dust, and then burned.  That's how tired the people were of waiting for justice, dignity and food for So Long. 

So. Long.  So. Very. Long.

Monty Python / Terry Jones, Chaucer & the 100 Years War

     . . . . The announcement of Terry Jones's death seems to have revived the controversy he caused with his book, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (1980). 

The book went into 4th edition, which is high achievement for a work of literary, historical  criticism, written by a non-academic.

Jones argued that Chaucer's knight had been battle-hardened in the mercenary companies, fighting for plunder and pay, not for a sovereign's honor and glory. The knight's story of battle-hardened legendary Greek figures was to show real politic and war choices, in the manner of Machiavelli.  This made sense to me, considering Chaucer's era was that of the 14th century Edward Plantagenets.

Chaucer's King, Richard II, was the grandson of King Edward III. Richard's father was Edward, the Black Prince, who died of illness before his time. King Edward III was elderly, and died not long after, leaving England's future in the hands of a boy king and regents, none of whom had the brilliance and sheer capacity for ruling, hard work or warring possessed by Edward I and Edward III. 

These are the times of the Hundred Years War. The English military strategy of chauvachée ruled. For those unfamiliar with the term, chauvachée meant no rules, no decorum: the army lived off the land, plundered everything it could eat and carry, burned the rest, and killed civilians, including women and children, as a matter of purpose. *

The Hundred Years War was a golden age for mercenary war lords and their 'Free Companies." One of the most famous and richest was that of English John Hawkwood.* Joining up with Hawkwood's mercenaries was the foundation of many an English family's rise in fortune and rank, as was the chauvachée plundering of France by members of the English armies. Used to plundering at will with little or no repercussion, some of the nobility and unemployed mercenaries and soldiers during truces took doing the same in parts of the realm of England.  It wasn't a very good time for many in England in the dotage years of King Edward III, and the boy king Richard's, and, then, King Richard II's own reign.**

So, count on someone with a high sense of humor, satire and irony -- as we see in every frame of Monty Python works -- to recognize humor, satire and irony, and mockery of genteel Romance-fiction traditions in the work of another great artist like Chaucer.  But as with the placement of slavery as central to the history of the American War of Independence, the Constitution, the War of the Rebellion, traditionalists of literary scholarship tended to clutch pearls when first confronted with such irreverent revisionist literary history.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*      There are concrete descriptions of what a campaign of chauvachée meant for entire departments of France in Maurice Druon's historical fiction series, The Accursed Kings.
Also in the excellent biography, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III Father of the English Nation (2006), by Ian Mortimer.

* *   Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite of his own works is an historical novel titled by the name Hawkwood's mercenaries were given, The White Company. There are numerous historical figures in The White Company, including the Black Prince, but Hawkwood is not among them. 

***   Richard II was deposed in 1399.

Survival in the Polar Vortex -- ABC Murders

     . . . . Whatever the ABC Murders is (2018; ITV > amazon prime), it is not Agatha Christie. 

It lacks charm and wit, warmth and satisfaction. The storytelling is poor. There is little detection. 

Therefore this three-episoder has nothing to do with Christie's famous Poirot novel of the same title. Worst of all, Poirot's character was given an entirely different backstory to that Christie had given him.  None of the other characters were what they were in Christie's novel either.

So, the question is, why bother calling it Poirot at all?

I ask, because, so changing up Christie's book and characters interfered with experiencing the ABC Murders and Malkovich's performance as the aging Belgian detective still living in England after seeking asylum from WWI so long ago, in any fair and objective manner.

As a viewer I'm attracted to watch this because of Agatha Christie and her character, Poirot.  Whether that is fair of me as a viewer or not, is beside the point because "Christie" and "Poirot" are how the production is advertised and presented, so thus we viewers are going to have some expectations derived from both-- none of which are met. 

This is most unfair to Malkovich, one thinks, who is giving his best to be the best Poirot he can be, but he's never Poirot as many generations of readers and watchers of the very many adaptations of his detecting have come to know him.

The John Mslkovich Poirot is so dark that he might as well be Tom Hardy's James Keziah Delaney, in BBCI's Taboo (2017).

Malkovich faced a very difficult proposition taking on the role of Poirot in the first place.  But changing up the plot, the characters and Poirot's character itself gave him a nearly insurmountable challenge to engage the viewer.  That Poirot has aged, become sad, without optimism, and again fearful of a future overrun by Germans and racism is understandable and certainly can be, and has been, done -- notably the David Suchet Poirot of The Orient Express, in which his recognition of the global anti-semitism flowing out of Germany enrages and terrifies him. 

The flag of the British Union of Fascists, known as the "Union Banner"

This aspect of this production of The ABC Murders is the best element.  This is 1933; we see posters everywhere demanding 'aliens' be expelled; casual bigotry is expressed by many of the characters; Poirot himself is harassed by a gang of kids for being a foreigner; various figures are shown wearing the flash and circle pins in support of the Brits' fascist parties.  This also addresses current conditions in Britain today.

Here, the focus is on the psychology of everyone, including Poirot, not on the plot of detecting, which is not Christie's way.  So Malkovich is reduced to playing Poirot as sad and pathetic, mourning his lost glory days of  hosting "Murder Games" in the homes of decadent aristocrats -- anyone who knows Poirot knows that the very idea of the "Murder Game" outraged him.  Poirot has always taken murder of anyone as a sin as well as a crime, that he must put as right as can be by revealing the identity of the murderer.

So yes.  Everything about this Poirot is wrong, beginning with Poirot. Evidently the entire point of the murders in this tale is to rejuvenate Poirot as a man and as a reputation -- not to balance the scales of justice that have been put out by the shedding of blood.

I would not recommend watching this unless thoroughly unacquainted with either Christie's novels or any other interpretation of Poirot on screen (and there are many). 

David Suchet as Poirot in the ITV adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express (2010) This is toward the end of the series, when Poirot's and the whole world's milieu was getting darker.  Yet, see? there is still some sun.

But of all the screen, and doubtless stage too, adaptations and portrayals of Poirot, the greatest, without question, is that of David Suchet in the long-running (1989 - 2013) British ITV  series, Agatha Christie's Poirot.  It was a brilliant series, in every way, from design to cinematography to location and casting.  There was ample blood and detection, ample grief and outrage, but there was always sunshine too.

The Life and Times of Elizabeth I > Coney Catchers

     . . . .  Coney catching is still in play, even if looking for rubes and marks on city streets isn't called that any longer.

A presentable young white man stopped me on the sidewalk Friday and asked if I spoke English. He said he couldn't tell by looking if "the people around here spoke English or not, and it seemed that hardly anybody did." Which that, right there, made my hackles raise. Why is his problem for pete's sake? Because all around us on the sidewalk were people conversing in English.

Blahblahblah, he needs to get back home to Ashville, NC, where he lives. He shows me his driver's license on top of a wad of bills that is the money to buy his ticket home. The driver's license could be him, who knows. He is $6 short of the money he needs to buy a ticket on the China Town bus that will take him to Ashville, and could I help him out, please. He's "so embarrassed and humiliated to be asking but has no choice."

I know nothing about the China Town bus except that it takes people to the casinos, the buses are poorly maintained and the drivers poorly trained and often over tired -- accidents happen a lot. Maybe it goes to Ashville, I don't know. I do know Ashville a little though. I've been there. I've spent some nights there in a very nice B&B during our southern journeys. He doesn't sound Ashville to my ears. 

What I'm hearing my head is Elizabethan writer and dramatist, Robert Greene, who wrote the Cony Catching Pamphlets. They purport to describe how these London thieves and con men -- the coney catchers (various spellings; it's the 1500's) -- work on the ignorant and trusting from out of town to separate them from their money and other goods -- sometimes even their lives. 

Maybe, the guy was for real? Maybe he wasn't. In case he was for real I gave him a dollar, not the 6 he asked for. He wasn't quite able to conceal his resentment that I didn't give him $6.  I said, "I will be asked for money by at least 5 more people today before I go home and they'll all be visibly far worse off than you appear to be." He disappeared just like that.

As of today I'm still hearing coney catcher in my head about him.

Partly this is because about 8 days ago I had read the 4th installment in P.F. Chisholm's Sir Robert Carey historical mysteries, A Plague of Angels (1998).  

This one takes place in London. One of the characters is the young William Shakespeare, during the years the theaters are closed due to plague.  He's not yet Shakespeare, and almost as wet as the young Endeavour Morse -- though he will surprise the reader by the end, as well as Sir Carey, in more than one area. After all, he is still  Shakespeare, whether young, unknown and not that experienced.

This portrait of young Shakespeare, in the missing years, so to speak, which are also plague years in which the theaters are closed, is unlike any fictional Shakespeare by other novelists.  He’s working for Sir Carey’s father as a footman and for Kit Marlow (a nasty piece of work is Marlow) as a spy – i.e. spying on Carey’s father (his father is Queen Elizabeth's nephew and cousin, though he was illegitimate, via her sister from Henry VIII) for Vice Chamberlain, Thomas Heneage (who, like Hundson himself and Sir Robert and Shakespeare, are all real historical figures). The slim novel is very well paced, though stuffed with so much mystery, suspense, action and character in so few pages, all tied neatly together, and most satisfactorily. And, especially, this Shakespeare, and the reason for the Dark Lady sonnet with the wires out of her head – brilliant!  The angels? Counterfeit Queen’s money, gold coins, and they are the roll and role of plot. 

Robert Greene is also a character in Plague of Angels, so thus his Pamphlets were much in my mind, as well as Carey's Scots servants getting taken in by cony-catchers. These days among literary scholars the primary reason we are acquainted with Robert Greene at all is because of his Groats-Worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance, and that because it is thought to contain an attack on Shakespeare (among others; Greene was not a popular figure among his contemporaries.

Because of Chisholm's Sir Robert Carey series, I seem to have begun a project of watching -- re-watching in many cases, such as rewatching the episodes of the Tudors that include Elizabeth the child and gangly girl.  -- television series and films that feature Queen Elizabeth I.  Over the weekend I saw the 2005 British miniseries Elizabeth I -- not BBC (2 parts) in which Elizabeth is played by Helen Mirren.  She does as splendid a job with it as one would expect.  The series begins about half way through her reign and concludes with her strong intimation of coming death. Next up Cate Blanchette's two Elizabeths, followed by the 1971 Elizabeth R series in which Glenda Jackson plays her. 

 The one I'm looking for, and which seems hard to find is the 2005 four-part miniseries from BBC in a partnership, Elizabeth I: The Virgin Queen. This one includes Tom Hardy in the cast.  This one was shown on PBS Masterpiece in the US.

So is it that at a certain stage in her career, a woman of a certain stature in her career as an actor, feels she must play Elizabeth?  Or is it that others feel she must play Elizabeth?  There are others I'd like to see too.  

Here's a website with a list of Elizabeth-Tudor movies.

Ivanhoe (BBC) 1997; A Very English Scandal (BBC One) 2018

     . . . . After the exertions of Saturday in the heat, and the heat ongoing without any prediction for an end, any time in the foreseeable future, I was a wrung out limp rag of a person, unfit for anything, which meant the traditional Pasta & Jazz Saturday night dinner was reduced to heritage tomato salad and a pre-cooked egg pappardelle, sweet sausage, eggplant and zucchini dish from Raffetto's (est. 1908!).     . . . . 

This meant a lot of weekend tv watching.

 . . . I don't know what to think about the three-part A Very English Scandal.  It seemed, o I dunno, inappropriately light-hearted and cheeky for an exploration of how a man loses his political career via the necessity of being a closeted queer and because he tried to have murdered another queer whose life has been warped by the laws about homosexuality -- and gets off from attempted murder charge because Eton etc.  I just don't know.

It was, of course, a delight to watch this mature, and o so not pretty, Hugh Grant in the role of disgraceful Labor party tentpole, Jeremy Thorpe, and the still very pretty Ben Whishaw as Norman Scott, Thorpe' lovely, but deeply disturbed young lover, whom Thorpe concludes must be killed to remove his inconvenient demands and loud mouth, once Thorpe tires of his 'bunny.' 

 . . .  I then comforted myself with the  BBC 1997 very sincere, yet a bit sly, 6-part miniseries adaoted from Walter Scott's Ivanhoe (1827 -- one of my favorite novels as an adolescent, and I still re-read it every so often).  Among the many delights of this series is Ciarán Hinds as  Brian de Bois-Guilbert and Christopher Lee as Lucas de Beaumanoir.  Lee emotes in the role exactly as he does as Saruman in Jackson's Lord of the Rings. The scenery is splendid -- terrific forests and roads through them, and magnificent baileys, tilting fields and the rest. There are some impressive fight scenes during which the viewer will not miss CGI enhancement one bit.

The political slant of royals and the middle ages chosen present the Lion-Heart as heavier and less jovial than maybe Scott chose -- more in line with Steven Runciman's third volume of his classic history of the Crusades, though he's still a hero.

But then Scott's novel was not middle-ages light either.  Horrible torture, anti-semitism, slavery, corruption of all sectors of the society's institutions from the crown to the church, sexual abuse of innocent women are all essential plot points in Ivanhoe, which are not prettified out of the story here. There are departures from Scott's text though, and all for the good, particularly with the character of Rowena and Athelstane.

Ciaran Hinds as Bois Guilbert and Susan Lynch as Rebecca

Maybe the best of all the delights is the actress who plays Rebecca possesses the perfect sofa-divan pillow mouth,  hooded eyes and extravagant waves of hair so beloved of Pre-Raphaelite-Rossetti pseudo mid-Victorian fantasy of medieval sirens.

Every time she appears on the screen I am as riveted by the actress's mouth shaping her words as were those men staring at Rossetti's  paintings of Jane Morris (wife of William Morris) in "Proserpine,"

"Bocca baciate non perda ventura, anzi rinova come fa la luna’, which translated means ‘The mouth that has been kissed loses not its freshness; still it renews itself even as does the moon’.

 or  Fanny Cornforth in "Bocca Baciata" 

and his own wife, Elizabeth Siddel in "Beata Beatrix."

"It's too Darned Hot" dance sequence from Kiss Me Kate

Yah, it remains too darned hot.