Weather, Inclement and Cold, Over-Busy Days, Ill Friends, Getting Through With History and Historical Fiction

      . . . . Subject line says it all, and I'd make book this subject line applies to a vast swathe of us across the globe.  The big difference between and much of the vast swathe, is that, tiny, cramped as it is, is snug, and filled with comforts. 

I don't know about others, but the relentless, graphic violence and jeopardy of children, women, and all others who are regarded as the rightful prey offering of the entertainment industries, as well as the entertainment industries' relentless offering of file criminals as identification protagonists has flattened my brain into idiocy, when not rousing me to desire to commit violence on them. 

Happily, there is an antidote that brings us heroism and the projection of loyalty, sacrifice, true friendship and virtues to the fore, while providing good escape action adventure into the past.  The Overdrive- Libby historical fiction series, Duke Classics, has put these novels up on the public libraries that subscribe to Overdrive - Libbey.  These a novels that our great-grandparents and grandparents likely were familiar with, and maybe, like me, stumbled into on their shelves, in their basements and attics, but are hard to find these days, particularly in the libraries.

But one day, titles I've always wanted to try but never came across, such as Joan of Naples by Alexander Dumas, jumped out at me.  This is the 14th Century Queen of Naples (at the top of my list of favorite queens), who was a patron of Boccaccio, a good friend with Pope Clement -- during the Black Death, no less -- and who managed to keep her throne for decades despite so many trying to take it from her (ultimately they were successful, but it took them until she was old).   One can always count on Dumas to have written at some point (or had his factory do it) a novel dealing with a figure of French history about which one is curious.  As you can see from a Dumas era illustration the story of Joan of Naples is filled with action:

This is how one of her husbands met his end, supposedly.

One can access a medieval Romance, such as The Young Lovell, by Ford Maddox Ford. 

 Ford's Parade's End which might familiar from the BBC-PBS 2012 tv series featuring Benedict Cumberbatch)  and some of his other fiction are considered ground-breaking, like Henry James works, as moving the novel into the modern age.  But Ford wrote for nearly 40 years, and most of his work was not that.

As this particular Overdrive program was developed for university libraries, so today's few brave lit students could find such works for their research, classic authors such as an Elizabeth Gaskell, who usually only have a couple of titles available to a general audience, have their full bibliographies accessible.  Mary Gaskell wrote for money, so she wrote a lot of books, not just her hagiography of Charlotte Bronte,  North and South, Wives and Daughters and Cranford -- the last three BBC productions too.

The works of authors truly obscure authors these days, even to literature students perhaps, such as George Payne Rainsford James are also here.

 I have taken additional cheer from the vivid red and white of roses, the gold-trimmed champagne glasses, and bouffants of chocolate ads running on every online site for Valentine's Days.

We're playing lots of Mardi Gras music in the apartment, not only because our first events of NOLA Reconnect 2: Continuing Stories are coming right up, but because -- hey, Mardi Gras is comin' babee, and is nearly here, as of tomorrow.  This too has been cheery, and does wonderful work taking us out of the mundanity of the ice, illness (some with covid-19, some with other issues, and some with both).  

In between, hey I think a lot about George Washington -- Presidents Day -- that figure who remains an historic enigma. Was he really a terrible battle commander but a brilliantly astute political operator?  Was he real a dull mind that never read a book but possessed an intellectual organ that recognized what matters mattered when others couldn't even read the room?

So, among the museum presentation (Black History Month you know), other engagements, NOLA Reconnect, cooking cooking cooking and all that entails, etc. the hour of 8 PM is so welcome.  A couple of hours for tv and books! 

A storm, mostly freezing rain, rolling in.  Another storm Thursday, though this one is mostly snow, They say.  We've already had about three storms I think, in the last 8 days or so -- my sense of time is fairly weird these frigid days and nights, w/o any above freezing temperatures to punctuate.

I tell myself, "Get through this week, and things will get better, at least weather wise!" It's easier to keep that thought in mind because on Saturday, in France, two very elegant, lovely friends got married.  We couldn't be there, but they sent us photos.  O they are beautiful people inside, and so they are beautiful outside too.

 As for last week's tv, it was compelling, with some brilliant, brilliant characters -- particularly female characters -- and presentation.  However, I will confess that, while it was expected, the final episode was, honestly, disappointing.  It seems over 60% of we US voters feel the same about it.  Maybe next season we'll get our druthers?

We Remember ... January 20th, 2009

      . . . . What a happy day January 20th, 2009 was.  We watched the pre-and post-inauguration  on great big screens at SOB's with our friends, eating Brasilian food and toasting the couples with champagne.

Tomorrow's inauguration will have our hearts in our mouths again, but for such different reasons, as we fear for them.  But then, a lot of the reasons for heart in mouth are the same.  

Tomorrow, again, we hope, for the first time in so very long.

I never expected I'd write such a thing, but I never dreamed this nation could actually be in such a condition that we'd be celebrating a Restoration, a restoration of centerist, moderate neoliberalism, as a restoration of normalcy.  I think I understand the giddy joy of the English greeting Charles II on his way to the Restoration of the Monarchy.

Also like January 20th, 2009, January 20th, 2021 will be cold too.

Constitution Day

     . . . . Today is Constitution Day in the U.S.

Weep. Weep for all we have lost, when finally beginning to make progress.

In observance and honor of Constitution Day, the White House called a 'history' conference. They are calling it the "Patriot Commission."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/andrewsolender/2020/09/17/trump-launches-patriotic-education-commission-calls-1619-project-ideological-poison/#5704278c155a

Its goal is to eradicate any teaching of American history through the lens of the slave trade, slavery and genocide. Further is war on the 1619 Project.  They are saying that such teaching should be a treated as treason, i.e. a crime.

Further, hosting this kind of thing fits beautifully into shoggothinchief's* desire to run against Kamala Harris, rather than Joe Biden.

* The Guardian today, reporting on the latest woman to come forward describing being sexually assaulted by shoggothinchief, as "'It felt like tentacles': the women who accuse Trump of sexual misconduct"

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/sep/17/amy-dorris-donald-trump-women-who-accuse-sexual-misconduct

Grant's Cottage

     . . . . The historic site where President Grant lived for the last six weeks of his life is located on McGregor's Mountain, in Wilcox, outside of Saratoga Springs.

The area in which the Cottage is located was, in that era, a very expensive resort for the Gilded Age rich, who arrived via a private bridge railway from Saratoga Springs. The resort was lit at night by that new-fangled electric light. Powered by generators, the lights went off then, at ten PM, because the generated noise kept people from sleeping.  The resort was just a short walking distance from the Cottage.

In agony from the  throat and tongue cancer that was Grant's death sentence, he completed his Personal Memoirs of the Mexican American War and the War of the Rebellion there. He was dead less than week after finishing. 

Half of the contents in the huge jar of his cocaine solution, with re-crystalized by now cocaine on the bottom, remains in the cottage.  All the furnishings, including the paintings and photos on the walls, are original to what Julia and the patron to who provided the Cottage put up there in 1885, when his doctors urged them to leave hot dirty NYC for the cooler, damper air of the Adirondacks.  All that summer Grant, with the same inexplicable, calm courage with which he defeated the CSA, battled to stay alive long enough to complete the Memoirs, which Mark Twain assured him would support his wife and family handsomely for the rest of their lives.  Recall, Grant had not only gone broke, but deeply in debt when his son's financial company, turned out to be his lying partner Ferdinand Ward's Ponzi scheme, financed entirely by President Grant's name. 

After his death, Grant's doctor said that his patient could never have lived so long if he had also imbibed the morphine prescribed for such agony. But he didn't because it would fuzz out his mind, sap his will, on his determined drive to finish the book.

This is the famous photo of Grant, finishing the Memoirs, in his chair on the corner of the veranda, outside his office, where most of the work, particularly the editing work by Mark Twain, took place.

I cannot believe I have stood there.

I knew all this but seeing the place was deeply affecting.  For years I've poured over the photographs of Grant and his family on the veranda of the Cottage.  Grant wrote a great deal on one of the corner's of the veranda.  There are photos of him in the chair there, the chair that still exists.  There are hand-written pages by him on view, and so many other items involved with the composition of the Memoirs.  Material bits and pieces of the celebrated do not hold much intrinsic interest for me, but these things, o they did!

And at the end, we viewed the bed where he died.  Above the headboard hung and still hangs his personal portrait of President Lincoln.

I choked up. Shed tears.

Midwest -- Part 2, In Which My Personal History Shows Up

        . . .  Wednesday began with yet another 6 AM call – off to Madison.

 During the drive I read the entirety of the chapter that follows the Chattanooga campaign, which describes Grant receiving the revived rank of lieutenant general,previously held only by General Washington. This chapter further describes Grant's reorganization of the armies as General in Chief, most particularly the Army of the Potomac, which he took over personally in the field.  This in preparation for the Union campaigns of 1864, which Grant will initiate for himself as battlefield commander with what we now call the Battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania -- the following chapters, which both of us have been too spent to read yet. Maybe we'll get started tonight after family dinner, etc.

While both of us have done a great deal of study and research into what made slavery, secession, the War of Rebellion, the politics and economics, etc., neither of us have been much interested in the armies and the battles of the war.  For one thing, we agree neither of us had enough information yet to think productively about the military aspects of the war until quite recently. Living on the Chesapeake, and getting deep into the War of 1812 began the process of us getting some comprehension to comprehend battles and wars in the first place.  Though we think this process for us actually began with the Slave Revolution of Haiti, New Orleans and Napoleon and slavery, to which our War of 1812 is deeply connected.

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We arrived at the Hampton Inn in Madison barely two hours before the 6 PM University of Wisconsin’s gig, and to which gig, due to Madison’s rush hour traffic, we arrived a bit late.  Entering the amphitheater, checking the microphones  I got a huge surprise. A youngish woman puts herself in front of me and stands there.

Stands there.

Waiting.

For . . .  .

What?

It's another niece, the daughter of my dad's second wife's second daughter, mother of four children and always a go-getter, and always determined to make this weird,  poorly blended family accept her as a part of it. I blame my mother for her condition. Mom had a lot of the raising of her, did not treat her well, or respect her -- visiting the sins and character of this niece's mother -- who HATED my mother, and my mother hated her, and they were at WAR -- upon the daughter-child (Mom did not treat the other children of this step-daughter that way, raising them also -- but they were -- BOYS) as only my mother could.

How this niece found out where to go, and why she came -- this woman ought to be an historian herself, or even a private detective. Her tenacity and determination know no bounds.

It's a long and complicated story, but she may be the one person in this family who is actually and actively proud that we are her "aunt and uncle."

This, in combination with being back in Madison, where I was at school for nearly three years, is a place so far distant yet so formative in my own past, in which nothing is the same, all changed, re-located, disappeared, re-named, and become an enormous corporate campus - shopping mall -- stirred up all kinds of feelings and memories I'd rather have stayed drowned at the bottom of my psyche.

And so so we did the gig, and so exhausted that we did our best, but we weren't performing at our best. This didn't seem to matter to this audience of professors and scholars of African, Caribbean and African American studies and history.  This makes for a very different group – and even presentation by us – than a bookstore filled with predominately African American, well-educated activists, who, moreover, mostly have known each other for years.  It went well, and, even, unusually at an academic venue, where we get paid, some books were bought by the attendees.  The best part though, was that both niece and her friend were gob -smacked.  This was all brand new to them, and they found it fascinating.  It's pretty interesting that this niece is the only person in my entire family now has been present at something we do . . .  she's proud of that.

As the dept. chair who brought us to the U of Wisconsin was having us to his home for a sit-down, home-made dinner with other guests, it wasn’t right to invite two strangers along.  I felt badly sending off my niece (a very different kind of niece than the one whose wedding has made all this driving happen in the first place) and her friend, back to their own conference on nutrition, Menomonee Falls, that they’d driven over from North Dakota to attend. Which is why niece was able to come to Madison – but that was a two-hour drive for them.  As stated, she was determined to see us.  Maybe . . . this was a way in which to insert herself into the Other Niece’s wedding, to which she hadn’t been invited, though her grandmother (Dad’s second wife) and some of her other aunts and cousins had been?  I could tell she felt hurt by this.  Yah.  Family dysfunction already present.

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By Madison I was physically wrecked from far too many hours of driving, as well as exhausted from far too little sleep.  So when we arrived in Rockford yesterday afternoon, there wasn’t much left. Thankfully it is a short drive from Madison to Rockford. Nor had we eaten.

We ate at a Golden Corral! Blessed the city that has Golden Corral. Their salad greens and other choices to make salads from are always so fresh and there's such a variety. We love the Golden Corral, even when, like me tonight, there's not much appetite there. Something will always appeal that is right for how one's feeling.

I love how now every town and small city can have these available at a moment's notice for even the most casual traveler. It makes my traveling so much more interesting and fun. The whole country is filled with small cities like this, all of whom existed for a good  reason -- and have managed to continue existing for good reasons. As soon as one looks at their past one gets sucked in -- it's all so fascinating, and really tells the story of the U.S. from so many angles.

Rock River is what gives Rockford its name. It was on the original portage route for furs etc. to the Ohio, presumably, on the way to the Mississippi. Then, later, with the Erie Canal to the canal a town was founded, and with Chicago, the goods and commodities could go directly to the railways -- instead of as in the fur days, down to New Orleans. "Our people," the scands, didn't show up until after the Civil War.

After we ate, we went down to the Historic River District that every town has now, and, like every town now, it was filled with Friday night fun-seekers. So we walked about and looked at the re-purposed into brew pubs old architecture and so on. Enjoyed the big sky, but not the emerging mosquitoes. Plus not feeling very well and being exhausted, we came back here.  I was such a wreck, I canceled relatives and went to bed at 9 PM, slept until after 8 AM (DCST).

Gotta say – the weather’s beautiful – perfect for a wedding weekend.  I have even painted my nails in honor of it all.

History in the Making -Minnesota Orchestra Broadcasting Concert Live From Havana

We're listening to this history-making live-in-concert via streaming. It seemed to be running on Cuban time, meaning things didn't start on time the way surely Minnesotans at least calculate such things.  But for Cuba it began astonishingly on the tick.

 It was 1:01 p.m. Wednesday when Delta Flight 8876 hit the tarmac at José Martí International Airport in Havana.

Habanera ticket holders waiting to enter the teatro natcional for last night's concert.

Last night's sold-out house.

Since there's no direct or compatible digital links to the U.S. the technical end of this has been very complicated.  The signals are being sent to Switzerland first, and then to the U.S.

The Minnesotans have learned the use of hand fans as well, since the Teatro Nacional is only lightly A/Ced.

They opened with the Cuban National Anthem, "El Himno de Bayamo", followed with the"Star Spangled Banner."

The orchestra began the program with classic Cuban composer Cartula's "Danson" , but they sound so gallego! i.e. like saying "Pat Boone has no soul."  Last night they did Beethoven.  Tonight, at least so far, the program is Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story.

This event is, well, astounding.  Here is a description of last night's concert.  One can't help but wish though, that the Minnesota public radio announcer understood Cuba's music culture better and 'got it' that Cuba has brilliant national classical music orchestras -- that this is not the first time Cubans are hearing this music, played by brilliant musicians.