Brain Fog Calls For A Road House In Another Time, Another Place

      . . . . Road House (1989)

What a secure time it was that something like this could be a movie.  OTOH, I swear to gd, this is kinda what the Jack Reacher novels went for. (First Jack Reacher novel was 1997.)  Here we have James Dalton, a bouncer -- excuse me, Cooler! -- who is not only a legend for cleaning up night clubs, but the whole towns and counties that are run by thugs and other nogoodniks in flyover country nowherelandia. Then he moves on. 

In this film, the nowherelandia is in Kansas – or is it Missouri? Not only are the reviewers kinda confused about this but it seems the film’s characters are as well, but everybody knows Something Happened With Our Hero in Memphis which is why he's no longer there. Our Hero Dalton has a network of bouncers, -- excuse me -- coolers! instead of marines and Big Gummit D.C. Intelligence allies that Reacher’s got, but still a network. Or at least Sam Elliott as Wade Garrett, who is an even more super Cooler than Dalton.

So it’s the lone gunman who cleans up the western town under a siege of terror by local thugs, except Dalton does it with what he’s learned in New York University’s philosophy department, and his Asian martial arts skillz, instead of two blazing six guns  (though there comes the point when gunz must uzed; this is America!).  Not to mention the best hair and exquisite wearing of pants (not jeans! those tight, sexy black levis are for Sam Elliott) that nobody else can get away wearing because they'd look so stupid in those high waisted, soft, flowing trousers – but Swayze’s ass and legs are magnificent in them.

Road House was edited by the same guys who edited Die Hard, RoboCop, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Tombstone, therefore we are not mistaken that Dalton's character is one of those larger than life sorts, like a superman, while flattering us that he’s just like us really, the way Spider Man is (while Batman isn't just like us, being a zillionaire and all) -- while making fun of both this superhero genre and affectionately ribbing this film in which the superhero is a – bouncer. The affection the editors have for the film shows in many ways, not least in how palpably we feel the sheer sexiness of the feelings at least three of the characters have for each other.  It is really one of the few really sexy films I’ve watched, I think, i.e. the characters even gave this watcher hot feels.

Other entertainments that RH appears to make part of a pattern are the Travolta Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Urban Cowboy (1980), which may have set off this examination of fairly specific, but disparate US cultures in connection with matters outside the law or accepted mores. Flash Dance (1983), Dirty Dancing (1987) of course, not only because of the amount of dancing in RH (though it is fairly muted -- just like the female characters are in RH, even Kelly Lynch's character, though Kathleen Wilhoite's Carrie has good moments, particularly when she melts into sexy feels inadvertently viewing Dalton naked (but then, everybody does, even when he's not naked, but her moments just felt so authentic and you like her for them too) -- unlike in SNF, FD, UC, or DD), through pop music combined with pro and non-pro dancing. Here are supposedly normal people like us, who love combining dancing for fun as well as going for our personal best. But only DD and RH star Patrick Swayze at his peak of gorgeousness. Not to mention equal peak Sam Elliott gorgeousness in a different manner, showing up in RH, as Swayze’s sidekick.

Closing day for the original Gilley's, Pasadena, TX.

In spite of this superheroing, I too have a lot of affection for Road House because 1) the sex parts really feel sexy;  2) I spent a lot of time in my earlier in the famous Texas outside of Houston's gigamous roadhouse, Gilley's (where Urban Cowboy did scenes); the Double Deuce, judging by the size of its parking lot, was the Gilley’s of its locale.

That world is gone, as much as NYC’s world of Studio 54, Danceteria and the Paradise Garage. They were of their time.

I suppose we must also think of Cocktail (1988) with hyper annoying Tom Cruise? Which I’ve never seen it, though I think I tried to watch it, once.  Now that is a truly stupid movie – just read the story line!  But then, for me, anything that features Tom Cruise (except when he was paired with Paul Newman) is unwatchable.

There was a Road House 2 (2006). It went straight to video. They Say it was a sequel in name only. 

O. Dear. They Say there’s a Road House remake in production. 

Fight at the Double Deuce!  SuperHero Bouncer Dalton is the only one who can stop this going on!

It’s interesting that from this perspective, there are so approaches to liking Road House. Though the reviewers in 1989 cocked snooks and sneered about it, it's a good action film with lots of other stuff going on, the kind thing that attracted so many of us to the Reacher novels. The action sequences are what we see praised these days as making a movie "that's fun to watch." for those who prefer action to feels.  Alas though, the ridiculous part is the entire premise of a bouncer and national fame for being part of a community improvement - gentrification action.  Nevertheless, I doff my sombrero to whomever had the brain storm to translate all those concerns of crime vs gentrification and the hierarchies of clublandia, all constant subjects then in the era, into this concept. That is, these were constant subjects if you lived where these matters were going on and of concern, all at once, anyway, as we did.

The film concludes with the Jeff Healey Band, which is featured mostly throughout the film, playing a cover of Bob Dylan’s "When the Night Comes Falling." This film, in a lot of ways is comment on US films and culture of the time, and if looked at with care, done as a goof on it, in the same way that Dylan’s own sense of humor has done in his own films like Masked and Anonymous (2003) funning on his long decades of dealing with celebrity and the intersections thereof, while determined to remain a working musician who riffs endlessly on US culture and musical traditions.  I mean, the penultimate great violent sequence in Road House is a monster truck driving into a car dealership and crushing all the brand new cars. This could only be imagined in America!

This has been one of the most interesting movies I’ve watched in years.  I wonder … if I’d seen it when it came out, would I have gotten all this?  I … rather doubt it.  Sure I believed I was truly tuned in back in 1989, but from the perspective of this year I see how freakin’ callow I was, and how little I really knew.

Just who were those people who got away with making this?  They must have had a lot of fun -- most of all, this flick is relaxed, like they had been doing yoga and tai chai daily, for years.

Have a Monster Truck!

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Essentially packed.  Have some hours tomorrow to copy edit, change mind, remember what is forgotten, etc.

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?

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 . . . .

I Say, You Say, They Say, All Say "Abbott (Who Needs Costello)"

 

Why, yes, as we say, say we all, so says AOC

‘He is not familiar with a female body’

Cortez went on to explain the basic biology surrounding pregnancies, and that many pregnancies are often undetected at six weeks. She said: “In case no one has informed him before in his life, six weeks pregnant means two weeks late on your period. And two weeks late on your period, for any person with a menstrual cycle, can happen if you’re stressed, if your diet changes, or for really no reason at all. So you don’t have six weeks.”

Cortez added: “He speaks from such a place of deep ignorance, and it’s not just ignorance. It’s ignorance that’s hurting people.”

Recall the New York woman who waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the day said, "If men got pregnant abortion would be a sacrament."? That was Gloria Steinem They (the blobmedia) was determined to tell us, but Steinem said it was Floryence Kennedy who said, she had heard it in Boston from an elderly Irish lady taxi cab driver.

And even further back than that in New York there were Susan B. Anthony and Cady Stanton.  The staging of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson's opera re Anthony, The Mother of Us All in February 2020, was the last time I've been there.  Sigh.

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

     . . . .  Brain's been in a funk the last several days.  I hope I'm coming out of this state in which I just don't wanna bother because why bother?  A weekend without a hurricane, without a hurricane watch, without a hurricane, all of which were disasters to so very many of our near and dear, after three in row, has helped. El V insisted we Go Out to observe our Carnalversary, which is Labor Day Weekend (why yes, that was a date that lasted the entire long weekend!) helped too.  There's just been so much death, delta, destruction, voter suppression, and all around wickedness in the last few weeks that my processing capacitors seemed to have needed to shut down for a while.  All I want to do is watch old Poirets on Acorn tv and read novels.

Books, we have them.  I brought home two from the library this afternoon.

I'm going to re-read Sharon Kay Penman's second Plantagenet novel Time And Change (2002), now I've finished the re-read of When Christ and His Saints Slept (1995) -- well that one I listened to while working out.  This one I'll read with mine own eyes. Henry II and Eleanor have courted and married, he's become king.  In this second novel Henry and Beckett's alliance-friendship fails in murder; Henry and Eleanor's brilliant erotic, romantic, strategic marriage alliance of equals goes to hell yet with love abiding. Can there be anything more dramatic that that?

The second novel I brought home is The Personal Librarian (2021) by Mare  Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray. This historical fiction is centered upon the mixed race, passing for white, brilliant woman, who was John Pierpont Morgan’s first librarian, in charge of his magnificent collection in the building that is now the Pierpont Morgan Library.  I've been looking forward to reading this novel since late spring / early summer.

Delivery brought three non-fiction books today too.  

Toby Green's A Fistful of Shells: West Africa From the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (2019) a history of the African slave trades -- not only the Atlantic slave trade.  I wish we'd had this book back when we were writing the bodies as money sections of The American Slave Coast (2015).  

We received Ada Ferrer's latest book, just released, Cuba: An American History.  We will not be suprised if she gets the Pulitzer for it. She's speaking tomorrow night at a NYPL event, but tomorrow night is Postmambo Movie Night, so we cannot participate.

September 9 and 16, 2021

NOLA Reconnect Sessions and Postmambo Movie Night present

 

Cuba and Africa: Ivor Miller and The Rumba Kings [Some serious Congo Guitar Godding going on' here! ]

The bidirectional flow of music between Cuba and Africa, with Abakuá and Congo perspective

And, a book that can't be more New York if it tried, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destablized America and Produced Trump (2021) by Spencer Ackerman. OK, so it's not just about New York, but it is stuffed with what we experienced up close and personal.

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

      . . . . As for watching, I'm continuing with King of Boys (2021), Season 1, Netflix Original and the re-watch of The Last Kingdom, 4 seasons, the best 'period' television going. 

Brain, heart, soul in funk though, so bad has it been, that I missed working out one day last week, I keep wanting My Life Is Murder, season 2 (2021), in sunny, colorful Sydney, featuring Lucy Lawless as police consultant, Alexa Crowe.  In the latest episode we here learn that even if successful enough for Las Vegas, Sydney? New Zealand? drag queens cannot compare to the stunning, talented, spectacular drag beauties we are used to. Also, by time the drag duet was to go to Las Vegas, Las Vegas was closed, but they evidently didn't know that, even though Alexa's assistant, Madison called Vegas to learn for who rooms were booked. 

Thus -- I'm most confused.  Supposedly they are now somewhere in New Zealand ... for ... reasons? Family?  But it still looks like Sydney.

We  learn Alexa has a brother in prison and her father was something of a crook and con man -- just like Miss Fischer's dad!  The bro is played by the dude who plays Sam on Netflix's northern California soap opera, Virgin River. He isn't convincing as an Aussie, New Zealander, whatever.  

Alexa and Madison

They Say that Renee O'Conner will show up in one of the episodes, so Xena fan service, I guess? Alas, only a single episode released per week, just as with Vera's season 11. So I began re-watching the earlier BBC Suchet Poirots too. 

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

     . . . . This afternoon I officially began preparing for the long cold winter ahead.  I have discovered REI Co-op, an outdoor activities store.  This means they carry some serious cold temperature kit.  I started with the over the calf heavy duty merino sox, with extra layers on the soles.  I'll pick up more items like caps and more sox, particularly for el V in the next few weeks, as it couldn't be more convenient to do so, located between here and one of the library branches where I pick up ordered materials.

Keep on truckin' all we all!  

Watcha Lookin' At?

     . . . . The other night I was still sleepless* at 3:30 AM.  So -- Highlander (1986).

Set in the then contemporary NYC of the mid-1980's, and very early 15th century Scotland.

* Could the sleeplessness be caused by seemingly SUDDEN shock of actually doing things Outside in all sorts of venues, and SEEING people, socially and professionally, Face to Actual Face in the Real World?  It did seem as though we were continuing with pandemic life of quiet, solitude and distance and then it was like Wait! Bang!  We're back!  Sort of back anyway. We continue masking indoors and in crowded situations.  But with the warm > hot > HOT weather and out-of-town visitors and well, just wooooeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! We've been vaccinated for nearly two months and so have just about everyone else we know, well, it's like we finally recognized what FULLY VACCINATED means, and have believed in it. And we are BUSY.

Too, I have dear friends who are gravely ill. 

And one of my email accounts got hacked (fixed in about 3 hours thanks to el V -- what do people without an el V do when these things happen? -- among other matters that might be keeping me awake.

There is good news too. Evidently the distilled white vinegar was more than effective in ridding my computer desk of an attempted invasion by very teeny tiny brown ants.

Cuba's own vaccine is now approved.  They expect to have all of Havana fully vaccinated by the end of August.  Probably sooner in the country and the less densely populated areas!  Plus both universities that wanted Postmambo to do projects in Havana in 01/2021, have confirmed to do them in 01/2022.

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I saw this movie once before, long ago, maybe at a revival house, when we still had the vestiges of such things? This is quite an historical era artifact, as it encapsulates pop culture aspects of the mid-late 1980's, early 1990's. This is particularly clear with the choice made as to where and when the film opens, at  one of those fake, costume wrestling nights at Madison Square Garden. The days of Jesse Ventura "the Body" -- who went on in the '90's to get himself elected governor of Minnesota (which seems to have taught the voters nothing).

That this film experience is going to be more than a bit bonkers is indicated by the music choices alone: “New York, New York” lyrics sung by Frank Sinatra, as part of the soundtrack, is a Highlander running joke. 1985-6 isn't that long since the 1977 Blackout and NYC’s 1975 bankruptcy crisis, so the City’s still damned raw. We’re in Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), not Scorsese’s New York, New York (1977). The mise en scéne is full out punk era, with the Big Bad Kurgen antagonist channeling the theatrics of Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious and Iggy Pop, plus the tagged background in so many of the scenes.

But for sheer delirium, we’ve got as primary sound track continuity, World Wide Wrestling’s fave, Queen, and its fusion of Freddie Mercury’s glam rock, heavy metal and loads of other sorts of rock and other musical forms too.

What this mid-1980’s New York City soundtrack pointedly does not have, is Black and Brown. There is no Salsa, no Boogaloo, no Black music, not even HipHop, about to birth a subgenre of its own, Gangsta Rap, despite 1986 being the peak year of HipHop's pop culture golden age. Despite the omnipresent tagged scenery, despite the brief appearance of a single Black immortal, whom the Kurgan takes out, naturally, Highlander’s New York City is as White as you can get.

In the movie's favor, the landscapes and crowds of the16th century scenes in Scotland were filmed live action, not cgi pretense thrown up against a blank mud blue screen.  So those scenes have that reality intense quotient now too that we miss so much in what action superhero franchise flix have devolved into.

However, none of this conceals the fact, no matter how often the first installment has been edited, this movie is deliriously bonkers. It’s astonishing actually, how this movie make no sense whatsoever, which is probably part of its appeal, particularly at age 15, when nothing makes sense anyway. Movies like this weren’t as common in 1986. By now though, mixed tone and genre are the norm . Russell Mulcahy, Highlander’s director, came out of music videos. MTV Channel had hit in 1981 (“video killed the radio star’), so again, if one was 15, there was a sensibility here that would likely be working for ya, or at least forming an imprint of expectation.

Which is the only reason that can explain why something this badly done was able to become a franchise, throwing off one after another even worse movie in this "There Can Be Only One universe."

What a thrilling experience this movie must have been for a kid in those days (those who saw it  – box office didn’t make back investment), anywhere in the range of 11 - 20 range maybe? What could compete with that opening sequence that concludes with the most prolonged, explosive, largest ejaculation ever experienced in the history of the planet -- no wonder it is called "the Quickening." 

Sidebar:

Way back, sometime after 2003 but before 2010, I watched via dvd some of the 6 seasons of the Highlander tv series (1992-98) spun off from the movie. Which naturally did not carry the same electric excitement and interest of the movie. But there was a lot more emphasis on romance in the series, which tv audiences loved. In the UK this was kids’ stuff, but in the US the audience was adults.

Influenced by: MTV (1981) – Music videos, murky lighting, fast cuts w/o continuity worries (see also, alas HBO GOT); 

every melodrama, every movie ever made with the girl screaming while men duke it out, plus, you know, King Kong -- the girl in the pitcha is there to scream; the self-conscious snark of The Terminator (1984), tying up the screamer to the logo sign of Silvercup Studios, home to NYC's largest film and tv production studio, etc.

Influences on: Outlander (1991); Buffy – the Chosen One, and via the Highlander tv series – multiple potential immortals.

 

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.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

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.

Books, History, Asparagus, etc.

      . . . . Downloaded a really well done PDF of Owen Wister's Roosevelt: Portrait of a Friendship 1880 - 1919 (1930).  I can cut and paste out of it for the essay I'm working on, of the Gilded Age's boys who wouldn't grow up -- yet ran everything.  So like today.

Theodore Roosevelt, sophomore at Harvard

Even more so this time around reading Wister's book, the arrogant, casual white supremacy, bigotry, sexism leap out. 

Here we are, regarding the 'modern woman' already on page 10 -- recall the text proper doesn't start until page 4.

"Roosevelt’s mind was a great deal cleaner than the modern lip-stick girl." 

Quickly followed on page 14, in the context of their class's Hasty Pudding club theatricals, Ivanhoe as a musical production. This isn't the fault of Sir Walter Scott.

 "...Ellis Island had not yet diluted Harvard and imported Broadway into the college-spirit of our shows. Next day, the fame of Ivanhoe was all over Boston, and spread to New York."  

This is a dig at Jewish, Irish and Italian immigrants' own theaters, productions, writers and performers, that were very popular with 'proper' Americans too -- thus to Broadway.

One can never forget that Wister's grandfather was Pierce Butler, the largest slave holder in the south, before his bankruptcy that sent all the human property he owned to auction to clear his debts.

Fanny Kemble

His grandmother,  Fanny Kemble was a different sort of person. She left Butler due to slavery.  In her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, she left us an invaluable portrait of life in Jacksonian America's enslaved world, 

One cannot forget that Wister was a good friend to Thomas Dixon, the author of The Klansman: A Historical Romance of the Klu Klux Klan (1905), the third of his Klan trilogy, from which D.W. Griffith adapted the vile Birth of A Nation (1915). Spike Lee makes no bones about it. These books brought the revival of the KKK all across the US, which this time around was equally willing to lynch Catholics and immigrants as well African Americans.  Yet "journalists' etc. scratch their heads and wonder how such things as the murder of George Floyd, the beatings of elderly Asian American women, come to happen in this country.

One cannot forget either that Theodore Roosevelt's grandparents were Georgia plantation slaveowners, who sold a young girl to finance the lavish wedding at which they married off their daughter, Martha Bulloch to the New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt Sr.  Needless to say, in boy Theodore's NYC home, he saw his mother and grandmother what they could to aid and succor the CSA's efforts during the War of the Rebellion.

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Made a big kettle of split pea soup this morning. Cooked a sweet potato, mashed it, and folded it into the pea mixture of herbs, ground pork, carrots and red potatoes, plus some fresh squeezed lemon juice.  That sweet potato gave the rest of it a nice, silky texture, el V said.  “This might be the best split pea soup you’ve made yet!”  I have been making split pea soup for decades, so surely there had to be rivals in that time? What a splendid lunch -- especially with toast made in the new Toaster, a toaster than I now have.  Ha!

For the 6th time in the last 10 days we're having asparagus with dinner, accompanied by a bottle of Gruner Veltliner.  It's been a good spring for asparagus it seems; the Veltliners are plentiful in the local wine stores, good quality, and not expensive..

Best of all I was in the supermarket myself, picking out the asparagus -- myself.  I cannot believe the incredible pleasure I am feeling, shopping for groceries for myself in the stores, after over a year of not doing it.  Hey, I'm also a cheap date!  

I can't remember eating asparagus even once last spring; we weren't drinking anything then either except lots of tea, particularly herbals that promised soothing to the nerves.

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Mail is definitely slower these days. We’d been notified by publisher the second half of last year’s royalties was in the mail. But the check only showed up today. Audio royalties still to come.

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Recreational MJ was supposedly legalized today -- with enormous caveats as to who can and can't grow, buy, sell.  It will be just like the liquor licenses here -- very expensive, limited and mostly going to those who are deeply connected in the state's political apparatus.  It does nothing to make it easier for people to get access to medical mj either.  One still has to go through a gatekeeping 'state licensed to license medical MJ' physician -- yet another aspect of the necessity to be connected to the state political apparatus.  This requirement is really a license for the physicians who have them to print money.  A LOT OF MONEY.  They charge preposterous amounts to sign off on a form that they give you in their office to fill out.

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France shutting down again, for three weeks, due to massive surge in new Covid-19 infections.  Our turn again, soon.  When will the a$$hat$ running things ever learn?  Open -- surge; close -- contain.

~~~~~~~~~~

Still in the 60° range of temperature.  Overcast though, the predicted rain has felt imminent all day, but still holds off.  The western horizon looks as though rain is falling over there though.  Colder air coming in tomorrow night for a couple of days, They Say. 

Gilded Age Adventure Fiction: Allan Quatermain

     . . . . Haggard, H.R. (1887) Allan Quatermain, second volume, sequel to King Solomon’s Mines (1885). I’ve read King Solomon’s Mines, of course, and She, and maybe another Haggard novel, but if I had read Allan Quatermain it was long enough go that I have recalled nothing.

The series of narratives that are Quatermain’s memoir cover 50 years of the life of a fictional representative of those imperial stalwarts the Empire hatched in their thousands for a couple of centuries out via the English public school system, to fill the needs of the East India Company, the British army and the douty UK middle class. They were as much glorified by Kipling, as the grunt in his writing, and writers in the same mode as Haggard. 

This universal admiration for this dream ideal alpha (white) male, has Quatermain resembling Kipling in a way that at the time, Kipling couldn't imagine. Quartermain's  loss of his dearly beloved only son, Harry, is the motive for this novel. Harry died in a smallpox hospital where he was a physician. Quatermain blames himself, because though very well off financially, he wanted his son to stand on his two feet without dad’s financial support, to toughen up, be a real man, which Harry did, refusing to go home to daddy when the smallpox epidemic raged. Quite like Kipling's pushing of his son inexorably to join up to fight in WWI, and who, to Kipling's shock and grief was killed.

Colonial Brit Imperium superiority is on display on nearly every page of Quatermain, with long lectures on what makes an admirable man and the general inferiority of non-whites, unless exceptions out of a warrior 'race' such as the Zulu. 

It’s also broadly accepted that ‘white’ ultimately means British, only. Other Europeans, whether German, French etc.(Alphonse in Allan Quatermain is nothing but a list of ticked off boxes of French coward, fool and ignorance), included to show their inferiority as buffoonish figures of diversion and exploitation, at best, as well as targets of physically brutal abuse, as well as verbal contempt. This mode was eagerly displayed by other adventure genre writers, from Edgar Rice Burroughs, and continued to proliferate within the sf/f fields, including the buffoon as alpha male writer, John Norman and many others, even now. 

What makes Haggard exceptional among many genre adventure writers though, is his inclusion and featuring, women of agency who are strong enough to rescue themselves -- though not even their courage, proven ability and his admiration can stop Quartermain from mansplaining to them what a real woman is, and how to be/come that.  Worse, in Allan Quartermain, the girl child who rescued herself with tremendous courage and presence of mind, the reader is carefully informed that for the rest of her life, she was 'nervous' and subject to great starts and frights 

Theodore Roosevelt admired Haggard the writer enormously, writing him a letter saying so. He wished very much they could meet. They did have friends in common. The adventures and hardships of our heroes in Allan Quatermain are astonishingly similar to what’s in River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (2005), which I read earlier this year. It seems a miracle that Roosevelt did not die – many times – on that terrible journey in the Amazon. Nor was it entertainment, not a novel for boys (which books TR loved), but what really happened, to real people.

Original British P-1885 Martini-Henry MkIV Rifle Pattern A

By the by, the Allan Quatermain narrative mentions several times the Martini-Henry rifle which came in, in 1871. Could the martini cocktail, supposedly invented in 1887, have gotten its name from the Martini Henry rifle, an brought into the British Army then? Martini–Henry rifles were used throughout the British Empire for 47 years.

The Martini-Rossi vermouth was created earlier, in the mid-1800’s, from which some think the cocktail derived its name.  It's not far from the favored gin-and-tonic of the Raj and African colonies to a martini, stirred, not shaken.

The Legend of El Cid & Cornwell's Final Saxon Tale: War Lord -- Perfect Snowed In Entertainment

     . . . . La Leyenda El Cid (2020) Season One, AmazonP Spanish Original Series

The set piece of the first episode is a joust celebrating the meeting of the King of Navarre with the King of Leon. I'm unsure as to whether jousts in royal lists of this nature were in play back in 1060, when Rodrigo 'Ruy" Díaz de Vivar, who will one day be known to all Spanish as el mío Cid, has only very recently been promoted from mere page to squire -- but I may be wrong.  I am finding anachronisms though, which I do know are such, but there are also cultural and social bits that are historically just right, and are sheer joy -- which so far at least, this series is for my kind of watcher: pure joyeous (early) medieval period television. This is the most lavish and expensive Spanish tv ever, and it looks it. In Spanish, but dubbed into English -- or it can be watched in Spanish with English subtitles.

Contemporary Friesian Stud; They Are Still BIG!

A discussion about the New! Huge! Friesian (Dutch) Horse! introduced as a gift at the León court, also gave me great pleasure, as experienced warriors admire the stallion, agree he's magnificent, and also think falling off a horse this big is a long fall. Recall this is Spain, long before the Reconquista: the much lighter, but swift, strong and durable desert horse breeds are by now nearly indigenous to the Peninsula. As well Iberia was famous for horse breeding already by Caesar's time. As this is a Spanish production then, the horses are all A++ quality. 

Nor are the mules forgotten. Riding, or driving, a high bred mule is not a sign of low status in Spain in those centuries. Mules were prefered by doctors, scholars, and even many high Churchmen, as well as by Muslim wise men and diplomats such as the series's character of Abu Bakr (though I don't know -- or don't yet -- whether this is one of the historical Abu Bakrs of 11th - 12th Century al-Andalus or not -- in Islamic history there are many Abu Bakrs).

Got a kick from the references to the Normans and their New! Innovative! Superior! way of carrying lances on horseback.

Medieval Moorish Warrior Mounts

Birds are significant others as well in 11th Century Iberia. Ruy attempts to read warnings, signs and portents when he encounters them. In my Turkish 14th C fave, Ertugrul, the hero talks to his horse; Ruy talks to birds -- more accurately, he asks the birds questions, whereas Ertugrul opines, and his horse, who knows him well, tends to laugh. But the Spanish of the days of Castile y León aren't known to laugh much at birds of good or bad omen . . . .

This is spectacular tv, particularly if one owns a big screen tv.  All real world locations. Very colorful (and dusty). Nor is there CGI. Those wonderful long trains of armies or trade caravans that reach way back down the roads are all real people on real horses, just like in ye olden days of film. . The castles would not be that weathered and eternal looking though. Which is something I noticed way back when I was a kid way back when a kid sitting in the Film Forum for classics, independent and revival titles, adoring the castles in that Charleton Heston El Cid. Nevertheless I saw it three times.

anyway -- besides, Sophia Loren! whom we miss greatly in this series, as Lucía Guerrero, the actor playing Doña Ximena Díaz del Cid, doesn't (so far) provide the fire we know Ruy's wife possessed, and Ms. Loren possesses too).

It's only 5 episodes, alas. And I'm sensing he's not our legendary el mío Cid by the end of them, because 5 episodes don't seem to be enough time to get there, with all the  Iberian Peninsular politics, royal intrigue and betrayal among all the Christian states' murderously dysfunctional families (not matter how the centuries roll, some things don't change). 

The series begins when Ruy's a page and a squire. After the second episode he's still not even a knight,which is as far as I've gone so far, trying to not use it up all my delight all at once.  The actor, Jaime Lorente, ... though young, looks too old to be either page or squire. Does this mean they thought ahead, of Lorente aging convincingly into el mío Cid? Will there be a season 2? I sure do hope so.

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The day before the snow storm I as able to score a copy of  War Lord (2020) the final novel (#13) in Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Tales series, a/k/a via the BBC - Netflix adaptation, The Last Kingdom.  Thus I'm well fixed, between arid Spain and wintery mix, 10th century, Northumbria, though I will be sorry to take leave of Uhtred, son of Uhtred, who also was son of Uhtred.  But even this Uhtred knows his story has run its course, he's held his final shield wall. There is no choice.  Destiny, Fate -- are all.  

Like Her, He Really Doesn't Care Do U

     . . . .Response to a fool who thinks all fast food places should be closed even for pick-up, so that during this terrible economic catastrophe, everyone would be forced to buy groceries in a supermarket and cook from scratch, because, you know, cheaper and more healthy, and keep those unhealthy people at home and not infecting others:

The real New York City, in which I live, includes very many people simple have no access to kitchens (or even beds), internet and any storage at all. I cook most days, and a lot of days most of the day, and I do it from scratch from the various food suppliers that I am so fortunate to have within walking distance, and many of them of high quality. I have hardly any room to cook, but I do have a stove-oven, I have a sink and running water. I do really amazing, if I do say so myself. I have been doing this and nothing else since the beginning of March.

But I know a lot of people who do not have anywhere to cook at all, no stove, no oven, no sink. Many others have physical and emotional challenges that prevent them from cooking. Please, what can't you understand about that? Why do you think I'm cooking regularly for so many people, not just us?

That we should have organized all this a lot differently at the very start of the pandemic, nobody's going to argue with you about that. But we didn't, and shoggoth and all his monsters from the hell dimensions did not even care, much less want to alleviate or prevent suffering. They didn't want to do anything about control and confining it. Much less help the ever growing numbers of people who desperately need help of every kind.  For the ilks of shoggoth, the suffering is always the point. Why are you, who say you help the disadvantaged, then aligning yourself with these?

This afternoon in this covid-laden restaurant city, across the street, I saw a very poor old black man, begging, shuffling his feet in rhythm to the rhythm he had going by shaking a paper cup that held a few coins. Actually that rhythm was pretty sharp. He was thin, thin, thin, He had a mask – over -- which which he was scatting and alternately making vocal beats, according to the rhythm of his feet and his cup with a few coins. I had on my medical gloves and mask. I got out a $10 bill and reached far over to give it to him.  This should not be, but it is, everywhere.  And not only in New York City, but in your own city.

That you characterize yourself as a caring, compassionate person who tries to help, yet insist such living conditions don't exist, or if they do, only in NYC, and not in your own, only proves how little you know about the people you say you helping. It also says that like shoggoth's wife, "I don't really care do u." If you really cared, you would have known for many decades already that people live like this.

These fellow NYers should break our hearts.

 

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.