Incidental Reading

Beran, Michale Knox. (2021) Wasps: The Splendors and Miseries of An American Aristocracy


Why have book covers become so ugly, all across the board, whatever genre?


     . . . . Beran does bludgeon us with his theme that this class felt de-centered and emasculated somehow post the War of the Rebellion, and indeed were, and that the 1960's finished the job.  I don't necessarily swallow all this, as not everyone was Henry Adams, but nevermind. It's engaging partly due my attempts to figure out what it is that makes sorts like Beran obsessed with these media-declared aristoi all their lives, even building their careers around investigating and  writing about them, and, like Dominick Dunne, even to covering others like them such as Truman Capote. The ilks such as Babe Paley, the Astors, Vanderbilts, etc. who in the 50's and 60's got labeled "the beautiful people" by the ilks who hung around in their entourages.

For myself, however, the earlier figures out of Gilded Age New England* who happily get the most text, including even William James, etc., are often fascinating, though usually for what they did, even sometimes in spite of themselves, like Isabella Gardner, not their failures. Santayana is among them, though one doesn't feel he really belongs, as neither a Bhramin nor a WASP, and because he left the US all together for Italy, where he softly voiced his ingrained anti-semitism and sympathy for fascism.  IOW, no better than the ones of the 20th C, for whom one cannot at times feel the tumbrils should have come, useless arrogant jerkwaddies of self-importance founded upon nothing, that they were.  There. My own class roots show.  Ha!

Beran adopts that slightly mocking, self conscious tone reconizable among both the Brits and the USians of both birth and non-birth poshie membership when writing about these classes. (see Brit Simon Winder, who wrote three books of German history, in which he claims to love Germany,  in which he does nothing but mock them, for their food, their cutesy pie imitation middle ages villages, etc. -- he a Brit, from the land of bring the tourists to our manufactured village fetes and terrible food, mocking another country for terrible food and tourist attracting non-authenticity??????? -- and he's much nastier, btw, in that supremely nasty manner that is the signature of the post colonial Brit asshole superiority**) which further irritates me. Beran even snidely references Dominick Dunne, while coyly refusing to type the man's name, so one speculates then, that Beran is rather envious of Dunne, who now, of course, is dead and gone, like the world, and the scandal ridden jerkwaddies who populated it, whom Dunne devastatingly described in journalism, television, films and fiction.

I do admit to liking Dunne to a degree, since he doesn't project that personal petty meanness, in his writing at least.  Or maybe it's that Dunne was the first informer about these 20th C types I met, in Vanity Fair, which I bought every month, with many other magazines and books, across the street when bookstores were a thing here.

Regarding books and bookstores, btw, two weeks ago, their absence broke my heart again.  Walking along Our Street, here was an empty storefront in the process of becoming a rare and used book store, with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled, comfy chairs and everything else one could want in such a place! I hadn’t seen or been inside such a one since my last visit to Royal Street in New Orleans! Brimming with indescribable happiness and excitement I pulled out my phone to so inform el V and B -- and then was told this was a movie set, not real. My spirits plunged.  Again, I cannot tell you how happy I was at the very idea of a bookstore! in our neighborhood that has nothing of use in it at all. Only horrible restaurants filled with mannikans, whose only thought in head is “SELFIE!”

*Why does Beran insist upon including Theodore Roosevelt and the other Roosevelts among these New Englanders, when their fortunes and defining characteristics are hereditary membership in the NEW YORK ruling class, not New England's, despite having attended Harvard?

** Winder, Simon (2010) Germania: In Wayward Pursuit of the Germans and Their History (US) / A Personal History of Germans Ancient and Modern.

Author an editor at UK Penguin.

This is confusing as the subtitle differs, I think, in the US from the subtitle in the UK. There are two other books as well, in the same vein, Danubia: A Personal History of Habsburg Europe (2013) , and Lotharingia: A Personal History of Europe’s Lost Country (2019).

Women -- Lucan (2013) ITV-Britbox. 2 episodes.

     . . . .  “I’m an Earl!  This country’s gone to hell when an earl can’t get his wife committed into an insane institution just on his say-so!”  Scripted drama around the late 1970’s disappearance of a Lord Lucan who lost everything gambling and can’t understand why he should lose just because he lost.

So, yes, I’ll kill Veronica, he thinks, because she harshes his joys of losing all their money to his gambling, and because she doesn’t like he hits her, and doesn’t like that he chases around, and he's afraid she'll ask for a divorce. Damn this country where the courts will give guardianship of HIS children to the mother. So murder is the only solution. Plus, you know, I am LORD LUCAN, the courts won't / can't touch me -- except they'll take away guardianship of MY CHILDREN, so what the hell insanity is going on here?  Gotta kill her.  That what manly sorts who are at the top of evolution like gorrillas do!

Such ignorant, entitled, hereditary horrors these aristo Brit males of the 1960’s and 70’s! Stupifyingly stupid, incompetent to do anything, except cheat, whine, whinge, and blather endlessly about their infinite super manly superiority. Imagine this guy – he killed Sandra, his children's beloved nanny, ‘by mistake’ because he couldn't tell the difference between Sandra and his wife, Veronica. He then does his best to kill, Veronica, right next to Sandra's dead body, on the same floor, when the wife comes down the stairs to investigate what happened.  When Veronica brilliantly incapacitates him by squeezing his balls even as he's viciously beating her, then talks down this evil manbaby, he politely suggests Veronica kill herself with an overdose of pain medication, and is somewhat bewildered and quite bothered that she rejects this proposal.  She made him lose the money and kill Sandra, strive to get her institutionalized, and finally he had to kill her because there was no other choice, because MY CHILDREN. I OWN THEM! I AM A MAN!  A lord man! A man kills! A man is entitled to kill! A man must kill because he is a man!

He and his circles are all up in alpha male, white eugenic nonsense that only the entitled aristos are entitled by birth blood and breeding to rule all those inferior to them which is everyone, plus All women. This is the BS we hear out of these same groups here and the UK about what makes a manly man manly – being white and rich is a good start!  Good grief you’d think it was 1900, an era of the perpetual boy, with ilks of the forever-boy child such as Teddy Roosevelt, blathering on subject. Are these the same blind to anything but their own childish, temper tantrum desires man babies who are running England now and got the country the disaster of Brexit?

One of the narrators matter-of-factly observes that in those days “the toffs just hated women”.  The women in their circles hated women too, echoing their men's perceptions and judgments like the successful, good women they are. That was what was wrong with Veronica, they tell us, which certainly qualified her to be institutionalized – she had thoughts of her own that didn’t agree -- including not like having all their assets gambled away, while having three small children to educate and start in life.  One might speculate this hatred of women, rife among the aristos, young, middle-aged and elderly, male and female, had something to do with the trajectory of Princess Diana’s emotional wreckage upon entering the royal circles. 

This is an unpleasant, disturbing watch, though it is a fascinating period piece, which, alas doesn’t seem that period-y in our time, filled with incels and other overtly women hating groups and men -- and women too! -- who think it perfectly obvious, sane and right that women, gotten uppity, like the Speaker of the House, should be removed, punished and even killed. These ilks are the reasons women are marching today for their reproductive rights and their personhoods, all over the country,  as well as in D.C. for yet again, as they had to do in the 1970's.

     . . . .There was an earlier television drama movie with these events as the subject, The Trial of Lord Lucan (1994). Also on Britbox.

"An imagined trial of a man who, in 1974 London, is thought to have killed a woman he mistook for his wife in order to regain custody of his children. He disappeared the day after the killing and was never found."

Anthony Head, beloved Giles the Watcher, from the beloved 1990's US television series Buffy The Vampire Slayer, plays Lucan.

However, this is what Lucan really looked like, flabby and soft as any other manbaby who assaults women, whining whimpering, tantruming, because barred from Twitter . . . .

The Last Libertines

      . . . . We've been having some nice weather again, finally, this week.  It is much appreciated.  But now NOLA Reconnect 2 finished, we wonder how we will be making money for awhile.  We can't travel, that's for sure, for a very long time, whether we are vaccinated or not.  By which I mean, we can't take Travelers to experiences in Cuba or Haiti until ... when?  Even when we can, from now on, having plans in place for dealing with Travelers who may become ill with Covid, have to be part of work.  And in the meantime, who knows when Cuba will be able to re-open to the US?  So far the administration, doubtless concerned with myriad other equally pressing crises and concerns, hasn't rolled back the roll-back of the monster previous, though it was announced it would.

So, I read, traveling into the past.

Benedetta Craveri, (2016) The Last Libertines; New York Review of Books.

Until the last chapter, titled simply, "1789", we are in ancien régime France.  So much disappointment among the aristos, for all the luxury and leisure.  At least they ate and drank well, and were clothed in the finest of fabrics, unlike the non-poetry writing poors.

What I got from the book’s murky language – murky perhaps, due to translator, perhaps, due to French names and titles of people whom mostly we in the USA have never heard of  -- was a better sense of what drew so many younger  members of this generation of aristos to the North American colonial War of Independence, and later, to support France’s Revolution. This generation of ancient French landed, aristocratic groups, were outraged that the loss of the Seven Years War had never been avenged,  France had never regained her New World territory and both Louis XV and Louis XVI never did make war on Britain, no matter how often they began gathering troops to do so.

This is the class whose raison d’etre for existence was the glory of war, going back to the Merovingian eras, whether or not they actually could fight. Additionally, they, as that class always did, chafed under the absolutist authority of the King. After all Versailles, as we know, was built and organized by Louis XIV, for that very purpose, to keep these families under his thumb, terrified as his minority years had been by the Fronde. This was the series of 17th C French civil wars (1648-1653), within the larger Franco-Spanish war that began in 1635, attempting to overthrow Louis XIII’s monarchy, and that of his mother’s regency with Cardinal Mazarin. These anti-monarchal insurrections original intent was to protect the aristocratic families’ ancient liberties from royal encroachments. The Libertines were among the highest-ranking members of this class’s generation who thought they'd welcome a new Fronde.

But this 18th C group of aristocrats were essentially play acting in their private edifice of political-philosophe theater, just as it immersed itself in other sorts of private theatricals, put on by themselves for each other.  Marie Antoinette adored theatricals, so, see, for a single instance, the support they provided Beaumarchais’s satire of their very class, The Barber of Seville. This is how the Revolution got supported by this young bunch.

They coupled their frustrations to their Romantic idealism that supported the New World independence movement in which there were no royals or nobility, a war in which someone with ability, though poor, could become an officer. That promotion was possible without family, riches or blood -- and the 'natural nobility' of General Washington, whom they all adored -- impressed them enough they Romanticized the utterly over-taxed and utterly unprivileged of France, who were bearing the brunt of famine and rising prices due the sheer financial catastrophe that were the policies of Louis XVI financial ministers and advisers.  They seemed to miss that thousands, millions, of them, were very angry and filled with hate for their sorts, who casually oppressed and humiliated them as a matter of naturally entitled course. And there were only 700,000 of them in contrast to the millions of the third estate.

The portrait in these pages of Queen Marie Antoinette is mostly unsympathetic, though the author says the queen matured in the years shortly before the Revolution and changed into a more responsible and politically savvy mind.  After France restored the monarchy, the portrait of the Queen was burnished the class’s survivors into an innocent martyr, almost a second Virgin Mary. But for most of her life as Louis XVI’s wife and queen, she made enemies within that class, which had a great deal to do with their support of Thermidor.  She pushed her favorites into high, lucrative offices, and cut out everyone else. This was a world where all honors, power and financial preferment came through the favor of either the King or Queen – not merit, not in the least.  So even within the military, by class, nurture and tradition, always loyal to the King, officered entirely and only by this class, there was much frustration.  Yet the author fails to make these figures interesting, for the most part. They are not sympathetic sorts for my kind (though for some of the women, I can feel to a degree, and I do admire some of the art, while shuddering at the layers upon beribboned layers of ostentatious ornamentation of the clothes), though it does seem the author quite admires them.

There are errors of fact. Talleyrand never came to North America with the French during the War of Independence (he came as an exile for a short time during Washington’s presidency). France did not exchange San Domingue for Curaçao in the settlement of the Seven Years War. Or did the author claim it was exchanged for Guyana? Trinidad? both undeveloped at this time.  This claim was buried in sentence nearly a paragraph long and difficult to parse, so I don't remember, other than the shock because if India was the jewel in Victoria's crown, San Domingue was the financial jewel that provided the French government a shockingly large amount of its income.  Benjamin Franklin was not sent to France by the Continental Congress in 1766 – there wasn’t a Continental Congress then, or even a movement for independence. That’s just a few mistakes within the history that I know very well.  What errors there are in the French history and biographies that I don’t know well, or not at all – we only guess.

Beyond that, the chronology is all over the place, which makes for a choppy text, as opposed to one that can be smoothly followed, as to who is who, when and where. This is particularly so as the narrative is supposedly about how this group of men, and the women they bedded, frequently even bedded at the same time, came to grief, their world destroyed, by the French Revolution, but we spend at least as much time in the era of King Louis XV, as we do with King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette. It's not at all that the author should have left out the material from Louis XV's reign -- it's that as it is structured, it is hard to follow and gain the points the author's trying to make.

The most interesting section, because most vivid, with open spaces, as opposed to the claustrophobia of châteaux and palaces, was that of the Comte Louis-Philippe de Ségur and his diplomatic service as ambassador to Catherine the Great. Their’s was the great spectacle of a journey across the wintery expanses of Russia to Tartarine Ukraine, and then the Crimea, which her general, lover, minister, friend, advisor, Potemkin, had recently conquered for her from the Turks. This is a landscape and action, of immense caravans of coaches for the court, coaches each as large and lavish as a small palace, surrounded by the 30,000 at least, cavalry and more infantry, more likely to be found in great historical fiction that real life – and make Cleopatra’s barges, and the journeys up the Nile, look small and a bit tawdry.

Finally, comes 1789.  Most of the personages described in The Libertines, survive, often just barely, prison and the Terror, and then Napoleon.  Some – do not.  None of them have the lives they led before the great change, this authentic, anti-monarchy and aristocratic revolution. For quite some time, some of them retained their privileged ignorance of what all those words were really saying and the actions really meant. For some time, many of them seemed to think the Revolution was staged particularly for their benefit and amusement – and under their direction, because, after all, that how things were always done.  Down with the King! Up with the ancient families!

Instead, they had to comfort themselves with writing their Memoirs and hoping they would sell well.

Black Sails and Treasure Island + Outlander and Voyager

     . . . . Black Sails (2017) Season Four, final season was very good.  At this moment I'm still wondering this may be the most historically accurate action adventure period presentation dramatized on screen (and read in most historical fiction).  Cuba! Views of its bay and fortalezas and habana vieja that I too have seen and been to! Invasion of Nassau to put down the motley pre-era of Revolution crew of pirates, self-emancipated slaves, free blacks, indentures and the lower classes in general – as the greatest threat to civilization.

The Black Sails writers really read Marcus Rediker it looks like.

A deluxe 1886 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island included a treasure map.

 This isn't to say that some liberties with historical facts have not been taken -- for instance the Peruvian shipment on the pirated Spanish vessel, Urca de Lima, was made of valuable commodities such as hides and chocolate,  but not that ever more powerful chimera of gold! gold! gold! which is the ever more enthralling, ever more unattainable source of the stories of  Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island and Starz's Black Sails.  But, over all, throughout, Black Sails tacks remarkably close to what historical facts of Nassau's early history we know.

Guess who . . .  he didn't begin like this.

So it matters more for Spain and Britain to cooperate in putting them than the current war between their rulers. Their sheer outrage that anyone not of the ruling classes should attempt to change anything is brilliantly emoted.

These outsiders' ideals of anti-slavery, equality and fairness, have been bubbling along for the previous season, though sometimes submerged either by the imperious demands of survival, which means financing survival, and rivalries and conflicts of interests of all sorts.  In the final season both the ideal, inter-personal conflict and greed are at center of every action.  In the last episodes the audience begins to glimpse through the current action, the characters as we first got to know them in Stevenson's Treasure Island.

Professor Marcus Rediker

After watching the end of the series, I re-read Treasure Island, on Gutenberg since Black Sails is the prequel to the stories of all these characters long and long before Jim Hawkins enters the picture at his mother's inn, the Admiral Benbow, the black spot and all the rest.  Needless to say, in Black Sails, everybody was much much younger and very good looking, which they generally are not in Treasure Island, except perhaps that charming, enticing storyteller we meet as one-legged Long John Silver, with a parrot named Flint (Captain Flint is the central protagonist in Black Sails) -- and many of them had ideals of freedom, liberty and equality, escape from the real evils of the poor and powerless  attempting to create an alternative to Europe's ancien régime.

But in the end, as stolen treasure does, the Urca's fictional gold destroyed them all. And now they're old, so old, if not actually you know,  like Captain Flint, dead. Yet they're still chasing after that damned treasure for which  that hundreds if not thousands have already lost their honor,  blood and lives.

It had been a long time since I'd re-read Treasure Island.  What isn't different though -- and this is brilliant of Black Sails, considering its unique social and political concerns (also so much part of the age), which are seldom if ever found in adventure entertainments --  from the first pages already, the evil miasma of the Urca treasure contagion is in play.  Hawkins, the boy, of course, like we kids who are much of Stevenson's targeted audience, can't see it.  But the boy can see danger, far more quickly than the adults do.

This particularly struck me in terms of Starz's Outlander, both because I just finished re-reading Voyager, the third novel in Diana Gabaldon's historical romance series from which this current season is adapted, and the latest episode takes place at sea, sailing to Jamaica. The ships used in this episode are among those that had been constructed for Black Sails. 
Voyager's action is located in the spread of 1745 - 1765, only a few decades after Black Sails in 1715.  The African slave trade, slavery and indenture slavery were reaching their peak during this entire arc. This is something that the pirates of the era understood thoroughly.  The more oppressed the bottom, i.e. slaves, can be, the more oppressed are every class above them.

Voyager was the book in the series after which I quit, because none of it was working any more. The arbitrary artificiality of the obstacles being put int the way of the twenty years older Claire and Jamie, to have a life without running, and lots and lots of their happy, happy sex is preposterously obvious. This is the point where the series goes off the rails in the books, and probably does on television too.  It's all more likely due to the author's embarrassing caricatures of non-white characters and her ignorance of the cultures in the Caribbean in general.

The author's determination to keep this a romance, is, in the end, makes the effort only about the personal, and by extension to family and clan's well-being, which are still personal concerns.  In Black Sails, romance was not the point.  Sex wasn't even the point., though there was a lot of it, some, unwatchably violent and abusive, detailed and prolonged. Though lesbians were not punished for being lesbian,  gay men had to keep their love a terrible secret, which such demand by society and law at large, has effects on the development of character, thinking and action.

Loyalty and companionship matter of course, but most of all for some, at least, among the Black Sails' crews, there were those who had larger loyalties to ideals of social and political justice, for women and men, for black as well as white. Not only is Black Sails a prequel to Treasure Island, but it's a prequel to revolution, located as it is on the eve of the Era of Revolutions that set the whole world on fire (with help from that anti-revolutionary, Emperor  Napoleon) -- Washington, George Danton, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Símon Bolívar.  But the Outlander books, really about Claire and Jamie's ROMANCE, and  her family and their romance,s as more and younger members of her family arrive in the past from the future, are missing this dimension.

Perhaps that makes the contrast between Starz Outlander and Black Sails all the more stark: Outlander's Voyager turned us cranky and impatient; Black Sails got ever more compelling as the seasons and episodes rolled on.

Reading Women Wealth and Art -- and Reading Women, Poverty and Catastrophe

     . . . . I have finished reading Donna M. Lucey's (2017) Sargent's Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas.  

One of the four figures profiled in Sargent's Women is Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler. Elizabeth was one of the siblings in the tragic Chanler family, among whose possessions is the New York fiefdom of Rokeby, as the Chanlers were among the heirs to the unfathomably vast Astor family fortune. As Archie Chanler was Elizabeth older brother, she also figures largely in a biography I read last month, Lucey's Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age (2005). 

     . . . .Amélie Rives (Chanler) of Virginia, a member of the southern aristocracy born in the decade after the abolition of slavery, was a manic pixie dream girl before Zelda Fitzgerald's time. One of the great propagandists for the revised history of the War of the Rebellion, she found her métier to fame, and  thus, ultimately fortune in marriage to an Astor heir, by writing scandalous-for-the-time sexual fiction.  Good grief, on one page the author describes a man breathlessly kissing his inamorata's knee! 

Worse! the inamorata likes it! Adding to her ever lengthening tail of scandal Amélie painted herself.

She reproduced her self-portrait as a post card which she sowed broadcast across the lands!


Sargant never painted Amélie, though he did paint, as mentioned initially, Amélie's sworn enemy, her husband's sister Elizabeth.


     . . . .The first of Sargent's four women Lucey presents to us is Elsie Palmer, the oldest daughter of US railroad magnate, General (one the side of the Union) William Jackson Palmer.  Elsie ultimately married L.H. Meyers, author of the 1930's trilogy, The Root and the Flower, a philosophical-mystical-historical-fantasy set in the Mughal India of Emperor Akbar (where Meyers  never set foot).  I've been reading this for months, becoming too impatient to ever continue beyond a few pages every time I open the huge volume. Myers, ultimately finding this world far too unsatisfying in comparison with how it should be, killed himself.

As we can see from her subjects, Donna Lucey has a fondness for the more colorful figures out of the Gilded Age's obscene plutocracy. Being plutocracy heirs, the sorts of women Sargent's portraits have immortalized, his subjects don't generally merit book-length biographies, thus Lucey's decision to do four of them in a single work.  For example two of Sargent's women, Elsie Palmer and Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler, are remembered only for being one of the Great Artist's portraits, and the relationships with the men who made the money -- or, in Elsie's case, her author-husband who married her father's money.

For Lucia Fairchild Fuller, the one of them, who from early on, was actually poor, due to her father's bad business decisions which lost him his wealth, and her richer siblings' meanness, Lucey makes a convincing case that she should be better remembered than she is. This seems an odd decision on Lucey's part, as Sargent didn't paint Lucia, but her sister, Sally Fairchild, one of the greatest beauties of her day. However, Sally not only did not accomplish anything, she never even married a famous / rich fellow, despite many proposals early on. So, around the portrait of Sally, Lucey constructs the truly interesting story of the unpainted sister, Lucia Fairchild, who was a successful artist in her own right. Lucey made the right decision -- it is a fascinating story, that ends in untimely death, due to Lucia's overwork supporting a family of feckless husband and loving children.  But there is also a great deal of joy and fun in her life too, which the author describes in telling detail.

Isabella Stewart Gardner's home, now the Gardener Museum, from the outside, 

Inside the Gardner Museum

As well, the other exception to non-accomplishment among these four women is Isabella "Belle" Stewart Gardner, the woman who gave us the justifiably famed Gardner Museum in Boston. What a story!  What a character!  I had no idea. Over the years, due to the location of the Gardner Museum, I had a presumed idea in mind of who Isabella Stewart Gardner had to be: earnest, learned, proper, civic-minded as so many of the women we meet in the Boston of Louisa May Alcott. On the contrary, Isabella Stewart Gardner was a personage for whom "banned in Boston" might have been coined to describe her.  Banned in Boston but this flamboyant, vital woman, with exquisite taste and a brilliant eye for great art, wasn't slightly discommoded, and hardly noticed -- no matter though, Boston noticed her.  Perhaps that's why the author, in her illustration to Sargent's Women, included two "Belle" two portraits by Sargent -- he painted her twice!

It is impossible to unpick these women from their age, meaning the power and wealth of the men who were their fathers, brothers and husbands.  None of them would be remembered today without that wealth.  The wealth was staggering, almost beyond imagining, if some of them, such as J.P. Morgan and Gardner hadn't left behind the tangible results of some of what they spent that wealth on.  Ultimately, this knowledge and the descriptions of this milieu and these people left me rather more than uncomfortable, despite that some of them have left us museums and the objects in them. At what price to thousands and thousands and thousands?  And the staggeringly plutocratic oligarchies of today aren't even doing that. 

Perhaps I understand the suicide of L. H. Myers, poor Elsie Palmer's husband, better than I thought.  He turned communist, by the way, before he killed himself.

     . . . . From these portraits of a self-enclosed world of indescribable wealth, luxury and indulgence lived securely away from the era's indescribable poverty I turned to Omar El Akkad's terrible dystopia of environmental failure, constant war and terrorism, American War: A Novel (2017).  It is the story of the making of a terrorist in the third US Civil War between Red and Blue.  Part why this future USA is suffering constant warfare and terrorism, refugee and relocation camps, punishment camps like Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib, is because it is in the interest of the other nations to keep the USA occupied with itself.  They send huge container ships filled with supplies to keep the Red rebels eating enough  to reproduce. They employ coteries of people who hunt likely recruites for a range of terrorist actions.  The refugee camps and prisons are among their most effective tools in the creation of such terrorists.  Massacres help too.

This making of terrorists, and what it is like to live this way, without occupation and future, in the ugly squalor of the degraded environment and Climate Crash,  is what the author is most concerned with -- because this is how the US has been making terrorists for generations. The author's text doesn't soft pedal this in the least.

Beyond that, since it is still the North vs South, oddly the author never mentions the history of slavery, white supremacy, just old hatred with a new flag.  He does say that the new hatred is deeply rooted in the old history -- which is described as the days of glory, chivalry and magnolias.  I'm still mulling whether or not this is successful. In the new hatred the south seems to have replaced racism with the Red nation's determination to keep on the fossil fuel teat vs the north and the rest of the world having moved far beyond that power source long ago.  It just seems -- stupid.  OTOH, keeping the old war alive as we have since 1865 due to outraged white supremacy and defeated slaveocracy is certainly stupid.  As we see every single day now, there are no limits to moronic hatred, belief and behavior.

Thomas Jefferson and Marie Antoinette (and The Neo-Gilded Age)

   . . . I revisited Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400 Year Untold Story of Class in America (2016) a few weeks ago.  I wanted to see if wanted to revise my iniitial judgment that the book was thematically and argumentatively incoherent too often. I listened to the audio download rather than re-reading the book.

While doing that I was struck in a way I hadn't been during the book read by similarities between Jefferson the Agriculture Philosoph's Monticello and Marie Antoinette's faux rustic village of Hameau de la Reine near to the Petit Trianon in the Park of Versailles. There she and her companions played at being peasants as Jefferson impersonated "gentleman farmer." He was such an 18th century aristocratic fellow (though in a mode that was also peculiarily Virginian).

Isenberg didn't notice these similarities herself. As per usual with White Trash, when the author approaches something revelatory, instead of taking the leap over the walls surrounding the Founding Father of the Domestic Slave Trade and White Supremacy -- she pulls up short and turns to a different topic-- leaving unmined the US's systemic legal foundation of 'race' in the constructing of white divisions of class and poverty.

It was an exciting moment during a visit to th British Museum to spy a first edition on the shelves of the Museum's Enlightment Room.

In the Enlightenment Room, British Musuem -- it's enormous!

Isenberg's chooses excellent quotes from various Jefferson documents and his only book, Notes on the State of Virginia, to illustrate his disdain for farm work, and his disinterest in farming in general. These chosen words suggest strongly that for Jefferson, "farming" for most of his life, was only so much "philosophy" -- fantasy world building that relaxed and entertained his lively mind, resembling closely the role playing of milk maids at Petit Trianon.

Water color of the grounds of Hameau de la Reine village, near Petit Trianon

It wasn't until Jefferson thought of agriculture in the terms of science experiments that he took any personal concern with 'cultivating.' on his own farms (he was a complete failure at it too). This was a deep contrast with Washington's constant concern with farming and how he managed Mount Vernon. Jefferson's exception to his impractical fantasies were his statements that breeding slave women for their "natural increase" must be encouraged as their babies brought more financial value to the estate than the crops brought in.

Wotton House, Surrey.  This pdf is a good essay on Jefferson's travels in England (John Adams was his companion):
"A Comparative Study of Thomas Jefferson's Travels to England and Their Influences on Monticello"

Jefferson admired the great estates, parks and gardens he visited during his travels in England (786) and in Italy and France (1787). Lacking the economic resources held by aristos to build such impressive showplaces, of course, he relentlessly mortgaged his slaves, and created an lesser imitation at Monticello with lower quality materials. That showplace of Monticello is an impractical facade, like Marie Antoinette's Petite Trianon peasant village -- a folly, as certain edifaces des amusants erected on estates were called in England -- except, of course, at Monticello, the slaves were real people, and truly enslaved by every legal, religious and philosophic dictum possible to invoke, and ultimately sold away from the bankrupted Master of the Mountain's fantasy world that their bodies, fertility and labor had bankrolled.

Isenberg shows Jefferson's philosophy of agriculture was formed by European models that had not a chance of working in North America -- particularly not in Virginia, for all kinds of reasons. Invoking the gentleman farmer, his preferred term for a farmer was cultivator -- not yeoman, though this is the word everyone uses when writing about Jefferson's fantasies of how the huge swathes of the Louisiana territory was to be populated and organized. A cultivator differed as much from a yeoman as Theodore Roosevelt's stockman differed from a cowboy.  Roosevelt compared the stockman to a southern plantation owner and described a stockman's life as the best life to live -- except that of a southern plantation owner in the antebellum era. Unlike the stockman's whose life was filled with satisfactions and comforts, not least seeing his wealth steadily accrue through the natural increase of his herds and the labor of his hands, the cowboy's life was a hard one, and an economic dead end.

Even as his language for the naming of the newly acquired territory's states could have been used in contemporary (bad) fantasy world-building, it was not the language of sturdy small yeoman farmers: Michigania, Illinoia, Saratoga, and Washington, well, OK, but! -- Sylvania, Chersonesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Polypotamia, and Pelisipia? This was an equally preposterous progression of the fantasy feudal slave state of Carolina designed by John Locke and the Eight Lords Proprietors of Carolina to divide territory into palatinates and baronies, organized under a hereditary aristocracy of margraves, landgraves and caciques. Nor should we forget the proposed Margravate of Azilia as a the buffer zone between Carolina and the Spanish Floridas. Instead of happy serfs however, they would have happy African slaves.

Logo of the Royal African Company

Recall that Locke and these Lords Proprietors were original investors in the Stuarts'  Royal African Company, headed by the Duke of York, formed to enslave Africans and sell them in the New World, in order to fill their always empty privy purses.

What does all this have to do with poor whites and class? Isenberg seems not to know, though this history is included in White Trash, it is presented without any connection to the southern colonies' poor white populations, treated as expendable waste by the small, ever increasingly wealthy elite.  As critics other than myself have noted, Isenberg forgets about her central theme most of the time.

Though White Trash's argument is fairly incoherent thematically, pieces of it are informative. It's disappointing that she wasn't able to pull together the history of white poverty and class into a satisfactory explanation of our cultural, economic and political psyche. But since she couldn't or wouldn't examine and / or reconcile the victimization of poor whites with the victimization of slaves -- or that of Native Peoples either, though they get some mentions, ultimately the book, though an interesting read, isn't as useful as the author expected. It really founders when the author attempts to force New England's ways and mores into her theme? argument? (it's unclear). The points that are to be made are obscure -- again because of how slavery operated in the north, and the differences between north and south in how they profited from slavery are ignored and / or presented in a manner that can only be called murky.

Isenberg is a terrific researcher, but apparently wasn't willing to work-up her analytical skills to spin 400 years of history around a central theme without losing sight of the argument and straying off into dead ends. She founders at the wall of black - white, which always comes up central to the history, no matter what era and which issue. So, once again, African American history gets side-barred and made lesser, even as the historian centers the class system of whiteness as American history. It's an distorted dialectic of class and poverty, which forces the argument into a shallow flat shape, lacking scope and grain. The further the book progresses the more it presents as rushed and unthought-through, as up against a deadline the author resents as too close.

Another aspect of White Trash that confuses whatever the argument Isenberg thinks she's making is that she repeats, sometimes even word-for-word, illustrations.  One example of this is the scene from Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Dred: A Tale ofthe Great Dismal Swamp (1856), in which a poor white woman and her children are described -- she uses that same scene word-for-word at least twice -- while missing that the language Stowe has chosen to describe this miserable family is to evoke compassion in the reader, not contempt.

Though written and published before the election, her description of Jackson's political base is the same as that of many descriptions of the orange's political base, and Jackson's braggadocious, impatient, explosive, improvisational character as many describe the orange's character. The politics of resentment come through loud and clear. Though this is of no surprise to anyone who has spent time studying Jackson and the Jacksonian era, it's deeply troubling in its implications for our own immediate future.

Panic of 1837 here we come.   

Then, suddenly, we're past the Civil War, and these same despised people whom the author has claimed did not support either the seccession or the war, and who ere so badly treated by the CSA, are aligned with the planter-political class.

Then we move into the age of eugenics, a/k/a  the Gilded Age, or, as I call it, the Age of Horror, the age that so resembles our own.

She's gone through the Civil War and into this era in which the poor and anyone who isn't male, white and rich are regarded as worthless. Yet, she never explains how and why how these supposed crackers such as James K. Vardeman, whose class is so despised, oppressed and repressed, got wealth, got political power.  In fact they get so much wealth and political power they now run the country.  How did this happen if they are so oppressed? Did the legal system and white supremacy have anything, anything at all, to do with it?

Ultimately the book ignores its own theme and argument.

Another Period -- Comedy Central

The Comedy Central series, Another Period, parodies the Downton Abbey era costume soaps that portray happy, contented, loyal downstairs who know and keep and love their place, who  understand how much superior to themselves are

their upstairs betters. Another Period is set in the Gilded Age Newport, which, it is said, where Julian Fellows plans to place his next a-historic extravaganza. Eps run about 22 minutes. A series of sketches, sketchily stitched together, the viewer wouldn't want more at a time than 20 minutes.

Among the featured plays is Christina Hendrick, Joan Holloway in Mad Men. She is a terrific actress with a wide range, as Mad Men showed.  Mad Men also showed that she's a terrific comedian, which she is here.  Her timing is impeccable.

I just watched the pilot, which pointed to historical class nasties enough to be favorably amusing. Christina Hendricks was in the pilot the primary reason it worked.  Her character's name is Celine, however her betters provide a name more suitable to a servant, "Chair."

Reading Wednesday: The Most Southern Place on Earth

The previous week contained very little reading due to being on the move almost all the time one wasn't asleep: research plus the travel time, meeting up with friends and concluding with the annual Caribbean Studies Association conference. Next year this unfortunately acronymed for USians -- CSA for many of us immediately means the Confederate States of America -- meets in Port-au-Prince, in a tourist hotel bubble surrounded by direst poverty.  You cannot go wondering about outside if you don't know your way around the local landscape, cultural, political and economic.

One wonders how this location will work out. There was a great deal of controversy this year, we learned, about holding the conference in New Orleans, as New Orleans is not part of Caribbean geography, as anyone who has looked at a map knows. This latter has been, of course, an argument we have been making for over 20 years now.  Though, as our plenary pointed out, "Caribbean" is a terrific brand.  As el V put it, 'Nobody was going to spend millions of dollars to create a movie franchise called Pirates of the Gulf of Mexico."  (Just like Cuba, Havana and New Orleans are all also excellent brands.)

Being so occupied, the only book I read in, the reading limited to the flights to and from NO, and in Breaux Bridge for an hour before bed, when the internet got knocked out from a lightning strike, was The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (1992; Oxford University Press) by James C. Cobb. This is one of the seminal works that explains the contemporary south by viewing the economic and cultural history of this place, a rough triangle between the lower Mississippi River and the Yazoo River.

The green is the Mississippi Delta.

It is not the Mississippi River delta -- which tends to confuse those unfamiliar with deep south geography. the Mississippi River delta is way down further south. "Delta" here means this particular locale within the state of Mississippi. Or, as author/ historian David Cohn wrote in 1935:

Peabody Hotel 1886

"The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of the [Memphis] Peabody Hotel and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. The Peabody is the Paris Ritz, the Cairo Shepherd's, the London Savoy of this section. If you stand near its fountain in the middle of the lobby... ultimately you will see everybody who is anybody in the Delta..."

This region is peculiar even within the milieu of the rest of the deep south, and even the state of Mississippi itself. This was a re-read; the first reading was before the March 2014 sojourn there. It was valuable for that sojourn to have read it before spending boots on the ground time there, but even more valuable to read again after having done so. All the markers that Cobb hits in The Most Southern Place on Earth are still present to be read, in the other deep south states, like Alabama and places in Mississippi, as Biloxi.

Africatown in Pritchard (where settled the descendants of the last slave ship, the Clotilda, from Africa to land on U.S. shores in 1860, brought as deliberate provocation to war, settled after the Civil War) outside of Mobile, remains as shocking in its tumbledown, malnourished poverty in May, 2015 as it was in May, 1910 or 1930 or 1940.

Katrina made all of it worse, as it's obvious no FEMA monies got trickled down to any of these Africatowns in the deep south, though of course the fracking so-called presidential library of Jefferson Davis got 10 million federal FEMA dollars and the mansion which a wealthy widow gave him, Beauvoir, received 4 million FEMA dollars for repairs after Katrina.  But the homes of the poor black citizens of Mississippi and Alabama -- nada.  You can see this, with your own eyes. They can't even hide it.  But nor do they care obviously, as the stars and bars flies over all the Welcome to Mississippi rest stops . . . .

Among the elements that Cobb works in so cogently within his main threads of white supremacy, labor economics and political dominance of the ruling Delta planter aristocracy is the development of the Blues -- why the development of the Blues, and their significance, in this particular region.  He provides maps that coordinate the birth places and earlier years of a legion of legendary Blues

musicians, which run up and down the Mississippi and cluster with the density of cotton bolls in the Delta. One chapter devoted particularly to the Blues is titled, "The Blues Is A Lowdown Shakin' Chill," one of the Blues classics particularly

attributed to the legendary Robert Johnson.  I had skipped ahead to that chapter on this re-read, in the hour before meeting up with friends and dinner, and then going out to hear contemporary Blues-man, Brother Tyrone at the Ooh Poo Pah Doo Bar, which  is named after the 1960 hit by the owner's father, the late R&B legend Jessie Hill.

The thickest number of blue markers of Blues musicians's birthplaces or place of early prominence is at the top, left. This is the  Mississippi Delta.  As Chicago, for obvious geographical reasons was a primary destination for Mississippi's black labor's outward migration, this explains why Chicago also is historically an important blues scene -- and later, for rock 'n roll.

All this history is chilling, but the hardest to deal with as an historian, perhaps, is chapter 12, "Somebody Done Nailed Us On the Cross". This is the chapter that describes how the power of the Delta capitalists was retained, regained and expanded into contemporary times, to remain entrenched in conscious white supremacy and denial of any economic opportunity -- and came via the federal tax dollars of the whole nation, poured into the Delta in order to provide aid and assistance for the Delta laborer to raise out of poverty -- stayed in the pockets of the planter class aristocracy. This is supremely depressing reading for all of us who wish to turn around the injustices of economic, political, social oppression, as can be understood from this, the last paragraph:

As was often the case with American assistance to other nations, in the Delta aid offered in the name of economic rehabilitation and human uplift was routed, in the interest of political expediency and stability, through those at the top of the region's socioeconomic structure.  As a result, the story of the interaction of agricultural, civil rights, and social welfare policy in the Mississippi Delta is especially instructive. Regardless of region, nation, or hemisphere, when economic reform proceeds under safeguards against redistribution of wealth or power, social and political rights will prove difficult to extend and dangerous to exercise.  Meanwhile, whether its story is told in the smudged ledgers of the landlord or the antiseptic memoranda of the bureaucrat, the phenomenon of economic and sociopolitical dependence is likely to remain as real and debilitating as ever.

The lesson is that neither assistance nor reform can happen from "inside" or from the top down via the ruling establishment.

Frequently Cobb draws understanding from the Delta's white supremacy wealth and power's support by the federal government, used by it to maintain black labor poverty and powerlessness, that this process isn't limited to one place in the United States, or to the klepto governments abroad.  This is a deliberate cooperation between one power and another power, united to keep the flow of wealth concentrated in a few hands while keeping oppressed and helpless the rest. The local power achieves wealth, and in return they provide the government the order of local stability.  (The Civil Rights era blew this out of the water for a while.)  More than once Cobb suggests -- back in 1992! -- that this process will spread out of the Delta to affect the rest of the United States in the near future, because that is how power and capitalism operate.

In other ways though, reading The Most Southern Place on Earth for the first or repeat experience, is exhilarating.  Cobb is a fine historian and an equally fine writer. The book is dense with information about the evolution of the planters' ruling class that adjusted to every change from Emancipation through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, FDR and the Civil Rights era to maintain its supremacy, while the laboring class, both poor white and black, always did worse. It's a brilliant study, particularly how the planters such as the Percys were able to divert any and all federal funds for "relief" during the New Deal to themselves, just as they did later with the Food Stamp program. But they were doing this even before Appomattox.

This is a book worth reading even if the south isn't a particular interest of the reader's, if the reader is at all interested in changing the way things are right now as fewer people own more and more of the wealth and the rest of us are left holding the bag.

One thing Marx wasn't able to foresee -- though Cobb was already getting glimmers of it -- that capital would reach a pinnacle of power in which it didn't need human labor at all.

I need to read this one next:

Then I'll be ready to backtrack to an earlier historian, C. Vann Woodward, and his Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (1951), The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955) and The Burden of Southern History (1955).  Woodward, a Bancroft Prize winner, one of the most influential of historians, who died in 1999, did not like the direction the younger, 'new' historians such as Cobb were going.  He tended to quite sneer at them in fact, particularly Cobb's breaking the ground in terms of southern economic-political history, by declaring the biggest change came in the New Deal era, not the Reconstruction and Jim Crow eras.

Which is why my method is to read the more contemporary historians in a subject before the older ones.  It makes it easier for me to glean what is still worth learning from the earlier studies, because I won't need to fulminate about -- o dear what you got wrong! If one denies oneself digging into earlier works there's a great deal worth knowing that one misses.

Interstitiality of Racism, Bigotry, Criminality, De-personification and Literature

What has helped provide this week's warmth, life's snap and crackle that keeps us keeping on, is our Vanderbilt amiga being here. She's so frackin' brilliant! It's a terrific mind-workout challenge being with her, so stimulating, so interesting and I always learn something, see things in new ways.

Her capacity for using the professional languages designed to exclude, designed, even, to identify, those who are designated as expendable, extraneous, less than "human," is superb. She exposes the interstitiality among the professional languages, where the boundaries between religion and literature dissolve into the languages of case law and incarceration.  Further, this is enabled by the formulized rituals of the legal system to debase the body, and remove it entirely from the person's own control. When a person cannot control even her own body for a movement or a moment (i.e. as with slavery), there is no more personhood.

Angola Prison Plantation work gang 2014

The complete control of the body means complete control of the mind. I saw all of this in operation in how Monticello's master, more than any other plantation I've visited, implemented physical control via surveillance, and even minute arrangements of situation and organization. This includes armed guards, no different in operation and effect than at the contemporary Angola Prison in Louisiana, which I've also visited. Angola is deliberately kept as an antebellum plantation, with the cotton and other crops planted, cultivated and harvested, mostly by hand.  I felt the same creepy, oppressive, desolate depression at Monticello as I did at Angola. The entire antebellum south was a gigantic prison complex of interlocking systems designed to keep the captives incarcerated.  It started all over again, then in the Jim Crow era, where armed white men rode the roads and guarded the train depots to keep the labor force from escape to Chicago, New York, California.

CD exposes the ritualistic racism that further allows while obscuring, how our legal system and the others deliberately create classes of those who are slotted for de-personification.  It begins with the body, and the body then takes care of the mind.  This is the judicial system, the prison system -- and I will, as will she, insist this is what the plantation - slavery system of the colonial America and the antebellum era was deliberately created to be. However, without a foundation for thinking of, manipulating other human beings, as less, as like animals, i.e. not human, founded in the languages of sacred texts and "national "literature", we could not get from the conception of God's creation to society's throw-aways .

I'll go further than this, and insist that without that de-personification there is no control of not only the "poor" and others designated as social waste, but no control by the elite over labor and the wealth labor's production creates. We see this taking place now, not only in prisons, immigration agencies and other apparatus of state control, but in work.  See: the wildly expanding use of "employee monitoring," that tracks every single move an employ makes.  Its at the point that the UPS truck drivers are even monitored as to how they get out of and into their trucks.  There is a right way, which doesn't waste seconds, and all the other ways are wrong because wasteful, getting the driver called into the office for a talking to and warning that if s/he doesn't shape up getting in and out of the truck they will be fired.  See:

 Esther Kaplan uncovers many of these disturbing and intrusive behaviors, which inform hiring and firing decisions, and can push employees to their limits, in her article for Harper's, "The Spy Who Fired Me."

Exploring / exposing these matters from this perspective is fundamental to understanding the horrors of the world we're in. We'll never be able to make a more humane world without understanding this monolith that is sitting upon ever more shoulders, oppressing, repressing, denying our worth, our right to even "be."

I sit during her lectures, breathless and scribbling..

Among other things she does, CD works with prisoners in Nashville State Prison. She repeats that the men she's working with know all this better than anyone. They have a language themselves, that addresses, describes and embodies the ritual of humiliation, denial of personhood and exclusion as social waste.

And there, if I'm understanding CD correctly, is the only opportunity for all the rest of us, who as a class is growing globally every day, to push back, by understanding, taking into ourselves, the conceptual language of those who have been ostracized from "society."  I.e. it's another place to dissolve boundaries between us and the rulers.

CD first began this kind of work in Haiti.  Haiti, History and the Gods is a seminal work for examining the kind of society in which we are currently living, that has declared open season on young, unarmed black men, and the bodies of all the rest of us as well.

Poirot

I love David Suchet's ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot (1989 - 2013), though it takes a turn around 2008 which is darker and uglier, less a luxe entertainment of justice served and order restored, though not necessarily more realistic. Poirot begins to feel the stress of his years of being the instrument of bringing justice to murder's victims, while his solitude begins to weigh on him. His large eyes -- like those of an owl -- that see in so many directions at once, also well with tears, more than once. In Murder on the Orient Express (2010), which pointedly is located in 1938, though he solves the crime, he cannot force himself be the agent of justice. Even his mustache points, point if not down, straight, not curved upwards in Poirot's signature second smile.

No little provocation for that love is embodied by the design and score of the title sequence. These are a seamless blend of the Poirot period elements (end of WWI, to nearly the outbreak of WWII) signaling sophistication, elegance and glamour. The opening title sequence deconstructs the decorative arts of the historical era that is being recreated. Art Deco and modernist, i.e. both revolutionary while harking back to certain more traditional decorative arts, such as the Asian and Egyptian. All this, plus at the end, a soupcon of occult suggestion. that further plays up the announcement that this program will deliver nothing of the ordinary.

See for instance, the 1993, series 5 episode. “Dead Man’s Mirror” (which is specifically named at the auction as Art Deco) where all these elements of Deco, Egyptian, Modernist etc. roll together seamlessly. The era's class considerations, roll together equally as seamlessly -- which is where Poirot differs so much in treatment from American attempts at these entertainments.

This floats with a buoyancy one would not expect of a series drama centering murder, in the decades that include the Depression and the lead-up to WWII. So we are further promised that we're about to escape into a English world that is as much a fairy tale in a never-never-land -- though without the delicious frou frou -- as are the American Astaire-Rogers madcap song and dance romance extravaganza films, the sets for which also frequently employ extensively Art Deco set design.

The title sequence literally pulls us into the series's escape by centering travel, which, for the elite and privileged who could afford it, had finally become authentically comfortable and easy.  (To learn what travel was like, prior to the age of steam and the innovation of passenger ships, even for the privileged, read the accounts by John Quincy Adams's first voyage to Europe, with his father, John Adams.)

In Poirot's opening sequence, comes first a plane (presented by a rendering influenced by period, industrial design, small enough to be a private plane).* Air travel was just beginning to be common -- again for those who could afford it, the most up-to-date glamorous mode of travel.  The plane pulls along the older form of travel, a train which has first class cars. For only an instant we see "Liner" printed upon the side of something racing along in these transportation scenes, which could mean either the train or that even older luxe form of travel, the first class passenger ship liner.

The 1920's and 30's are the interim between the old world of rigid class definition, in which almost everyone was either a servant or had a servant -- or very many servants -- and the world of reliable factory work, modern housing developments and modern conveniences that made servants too expensive and difficult for nearly everyone. Among many other elements this series is presenting, made from murder mysteries written in those decades, is a milieu that reassures the class elite's anxieties about a changing world, no matter how many of them are murdered by their relatives and lovers. (That supposedly is the attraction of murder mysteries: a bloody destruction of how things are, then, with the revelation of the killer, traditional social order is redeemed and returned.)

This wasn't going to last much longer, babies, and one might guess that Ms. Christie was rather more aware of this than many of her contemporaries.

ITV's Poirot shows up the Downton Abbey crew as fusty and musty as it is. They may pretend they're in the 1920's, but they're still lurching along in the 18th century. The comedy perhaps comes out of knowing that the audience identifies itself primarily as Lady or Countess so-and-so when, in the reality of those days, we'd be the skivvy -- who doesn't even rate her own name, as even ladies' maids in those days were called by their Lady's name.

If I have a criticism to proffer about this long-running series, is that characters who are supposed to be Americans just don't talk like Americans. But then, this is said about Americans who are supposed to be playing Brits on American television too. But it can be grating that British television actors on a British television program, when playing an American default to something that evidently is supposed to be either Southern or Western, and never is either one.

The mouse that runs all through Hickory Dickory Dock is not cute and endearing, particularly as it not quite tracks through a victim's blood.

Quite a few episodes of Poirot I'd not previously seen became available via streaming on netflix, including the brilliant 1995 series 6 episode "Hickory Dickory Dock."  For starters, the episode is seen extensively from the point of view of a mouse, including the opening, as the mouse runs down the clock. One of the suspects is played by a very young Damian Lewis, now Henry VIII in the BBC's Wolf Hall.  It seems too, that Rowling / Galbraith borrowed some of the elements from it -- or from the book? I've never read any Poirot novels, never seen a one around here, and am reliably informed that the book Poirot is very different from the Suchet Poirot. In Galbraith's The Silkworm, a meeting takes place in the venerable Cheddar Cheese pub-bar between protagonist private detective, Cormoran Strike, and Nina Lascelles – a junior editor, whose body language and appearance are perceived by Strike as those of a mouse. The locations of Hickory Station, etc. are also in The Silkworm.

Poirot, the Greatest Detective in the World and the Most Famous, flanked by his friends, decomissioned Captain Hastings and Chief Inspector Japp of Scotland Yard. 

Miss Lemon, Poirot's faithful and extremely competent assistant.

Agatha Christie's Poiret may be perhaps one of the greatest television series ever made, particularly if one's criteria include the design and cinematography. The writing and acting are top-of-the-line, with a fine ensemble cast that one greets joyfully in each episode -- just as their characters do with each when having been separated for long periods by circumstance -- sometimes they've been separated for entire seasons. --, and often not pleasant circumstances. As many of the episodes show, even as Poirot and Company travel comfortably to stay in the most luxe of hotels, to the most ancient of places in Mesopotamia, Rhodes, Egypt, among those unhappy circumstances is time itself. Time just keeps going, with murder and all the other darkness of humanity flowing along its currents from the furthest past into futures that we can barely see, so darkly does the future loom for Poirot's world.

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

*  See the first Astaire-Rogers movie pairing, before they became the feature marquee attraction, Flying Down to Rio (1933).  In fact, their last film pairing was the 1939 biopic The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle, in which Vernon dies tragically in a training  accident preparing to be a war pilot for the Royal Flying Corps in WWI.  Among others, there is Dorothy Sayers's second Lord Peter Wimsey (1926) Clouds of Witness, adapted for BBC television in 1972.