Post Christmas, Ante New Year's

Because of the bug I remain chronologically challenged. It's not that I don't know what day of the week it is, I don't know if it's day or night. None of the daily and weekly markers have been in effect since I went down with it, and then, it being winter solstice and the national holiday glaze, coupled with weather so many places that have shut down travel or even doing errands, no wonder I wonder, "Where and when are we?" It rained most of last night, and is raining now. Cold and dark it remains, midnight or noon.

With this frequent coughing I'm still unfit for company, mostly (our friends were spectacularly kind and generous in their refusal to be annoyed by it, I must say!). However, upon finally arising after 11 AM today I am feeling the first glimmers in 11 days of something like focus. I've started writing the essay for da List's annual feature, "The Books We're Reading." We're also working on the course we're teaching starting in February at Baruch.

I have two lovely Christmas gift books to read, one of which I happily read half through yesterday. Georges (1843), is Alexander Dumas's single novel of slavery, though it focuses upon rich, free mulattos and white prejudice on Mauritius, in the Napoleonic era -- with one of Jamaica Kinkaid's characteristic Forewards (Modern Library, trans. 2007). There are several aspects of oddness in this narrative. One notes immediately that Dumas chose to locate this novel in the Indian Ocean, rather than in the Caribbean, or Haiti, even, where his grandmother was a slave. It feels extremely odd that the eponymous hero utters grand sentiments against color prejudice, frees two slaves, and the buys two boatloads of slaves from his brother, who is the slave trader. Perhaps this perplexity will be resolved in the second half of the narrative?

The other gift book is Anthony Everitt's Hadrian And The Triumph of Rome (2009). This is less a biography of Hadrian a portrait of Rome's empire at its peak of power and efficiency, because there is little primary material for a biographer to work with. As an era portrait, to my personal pleasure the work begins in Spain, where European history begins. Hadrian's forefather was one of the wounded legionnaires who was left to pacify and romanize the Iberian coast post the defeat of Hannibal. The reviews state many know less about this peak era of Rome than of ithe empire's beginning and end; I certainly am among those. What I'm not going to like much though, is that so much narrative that deals with Hadrian himself as biography is written in that speculative mode -- paragraphs describing what he 'might have done,' 'may have thought,' 'where he may have gone,' etc. This is an unfortunate mode for any text, but particularly, one may think, for biography. That it is fallen into because there is so little written by Hadrian to go on, one understands. But maybe there is a different rhetorical strategy to deal with this?  One thing, however, the book has accomplished is to convince me that those who say there was an Alexandrine empire post Alexander are right. This from reading the pp. listed in the index under "Alexander."


Now, back to Sienkiewicz, snake handling and the church of signs.