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 . . . .

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?

~~~~~~~~~~~

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.

So Often On Wednesday Books

     . . . . So often Wednesday speaks about reading matter.

Herbert Hoover (2009 American Presidents Series)

by William E. Leuchtenburg, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (Editor), Sean Wilentz (Editor)

No matter how much and sincerely Leuchtenburg tries to say something positive about this thoroughly ugly, cruel, bigoted, racist sob, he can't.  Well, he did have a rotten childhood. He made sure everybody else he could make have a bad childhood and rotten life, he did.

Whereas Woodrow Wilson was a southern racist, Hoover is a western racist.  He created the border patrol -- because of Mexicans, first, and Chinese second.  By now these forces have become a private army called 'ICE'. But the constant murders and cruelties and incarcerations and humiliations and degradations were always the SOP.  And lynchings.  Don't forget that grrrrrrrr8 historically popular entertainment.

Americans With Guns: The Highwaymen, The Terminator, Bonnie and Clyde, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

     . . . .The Highwaymen (2019) Netflix Original. Retelling the 1930’s Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow folk ballad (faux) hero tale from the perspective of the two retired Texas Rangers who massacred them without mercy. 

I love that we don’t really see the killers, Bonnie and Clyde, and we never see their faces, until the very end, when they are killed in a hail of bullets. This underlines how much pov creates sympathy for even the most evil of figures.

This alone creates a discursive antithesis to Warren Beatty and Fay Dunaway's Bonnie and Clyde (1967), the one, after seeing it, I declared their deaths were necessary and not heroic. “They killed innocent people,” I said, which was indeed shown on screen in that film so famous and vaunted for style and counter-cultural narrative, and which influenced the style of women as much as the real life Bonnie Parker’s did (the beret! hair style! writing very poor poetry!). My mistake of a first husband responded, “They were just stupid people. Who cares?” showing our marriage was rushing down the drain of irreconcilable differences.

This one, featuromg wonderful Kevin Costner (who also produced and directed), and equally wonderful Woody Harelson, is sort of a present day counter-cultural narrative, taking mild pains to condemn the giddy media coverage of these un-Robin Hoods, who rob banks and kill poor and innocent people, and the even more frenzied support of the public, naming them heroes. It’s speaking to the instantaneous  with which online communities build up and take down figures 

– even to the Columbine killers in their flapping dusters under which they conceal weapons, as does The Terminator’s (1984) Kyle Reese, when trying to save Sarah Connor from Schwartzenager.

But it wants to have its condemnation of mass media glamorization of violence and have its violence too, quite like John Ford, after re-examining his decades of films of glamorizing the single righteous man with a gun, tries to do, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Like The Highwaymen, so does this fail, in the end., when Jimmy Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, who condemns violence in favor of the law and court, to save his own masculinity, goes out with a gun to face Lee Marvin’s Valance, the most violent man of all, while John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon is the real secret assassin behind the wall – and the paper’s editor prefers to prints the lie of Stoddard glory rather than the truth of Donophin's anonymous kill – and Stoddard gets the girl and become a Unites States Senator on the back of the glory of his fake kill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1hLe8rSir0

There’s a sly scene in which Kevin Costner’s Frank Hamer – is acquiring the armory with which he’s going to face the Barrow Gang.  He requests one lethal weapon after another from the gun seller.  The seller says, “Which one do you want?” He says, “All.”  Right out of the 1984 The Terminator*, where Arnold Shwartzenager plays the same scene, with the same terse words, originally, though the scene doesn't conclude the same way with Hamer's acquisitions. 

Things get more cruel and heartless in the future than they already are -- and let's not forget what's around the corner historically from this moment in Germany and Europe.

A great deal is made in The Highwaymen by Hamer and Maney Gault, with barely straight faces, concerning the technological advances in law enforcement since the days they rode the Mexican borders on horseback with their peace keepers – wire taps on the party phone lines! While surely most of those watching this Netflix Original film have no idea what a party line even is. So here we have a chronological meditation meta rondelay between three films: Bonnie and Clyde (1967), also set in the 1930’s, The Terminator (1984) set in the 1980’s but permeated by 2049, only 20 years in the future of the time in which we are watching (2019) The Highwaymen, still set in the 1930’s. 

The scenes of endless highway unfurling over the Texas llano under the endless sky within far distant horizons banked with blue, lavender and white cloud strata, and at the west the nearly set sun glows palely, soothe our troubled soul and sore heart.

The location scenes in Louisiana's dark woodlands are disturbing, evocative of inevitable impending bloody justice, as we drive those narrow dirt roads between the piney woods not yet lumbered out.  It's the drive to Angola Prison, always dark, always confined, whether day or night, sunshine or cloud. A long way of unbroken oppression, with only cruel confinement at the end of the road.

I enjoyed watching this film then for several reasons.  It gave me a lot to look at that I liked, starting with the primary actors, and ending with the landscape. That is America.  We cannot separate who we are from where we are, or, as can also be said, economic, political, cultural and technological, there's a lot of US history to unpack here, provided with a not so concealed wink.

Many thanks to Richard Slotkin's magnificent trilogy of histories that insightfully examine the history of the USA through its culture of violence, giving a primary role to our entertainments that celebrate the righteous solitary man with a gun as the solution to every problem: Regeneration Through Violence (1973); The Fatal Environment (1985); Gunfighter Nation (1992).

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

*The Terminator (1984). Sheer coincidence that it is currently streaming on Netflix so I watched it right after The Highwaymen.  I’ve never seen it before, which seems, somehow, odd. But until Buffy and dvds and streaming, I chose to stay away from most films filled from stem to stern with violence, which is called ‘action.’ For decades this kind of violence was so disturbing to me, I literally could not watch it, as I didn’t grow up on a constant viewing diet of of violence committed by people against people in gory detail – especially that done to women. And then, of course the additional trauma of the kidnapping, torture and rape of my sister.  I still find detailed violence disturbing enough that I cannot keep my eyes on the screen, often leave the room, but, you know, completist.

So, considering some of the early scenes of shotgun concealed under a duster – the good guy – it feels that maybe the Columbine shooters got the idea here, rather than The Matrix.  Or both, of course.  The internet is filled with sites featuring dusters from both films, advertised for sale, the models holding weapons.

Killing Eve: Villainous Villain Villanelle Is Not Orphan Black's Helena BBC / BBC America 2018

     . . . . Killing Eve was a US - British critics' favorite 2018 television series - perhaps even more favorite than Body Guard, centering Robb Stark Richard Madden, which is all about a guy.

Commonly these are the words used by the critics to describe Killing Eve:

Stylish, Snappy, Sharp, Snazzy, Sophisticated, Sexy, Smart.

Also: Light-hearted, Urbane, Cosmopolitan, Entertaining.  

 Myself, I would add Short (Thank Goodness!).  Preposterous (O! so Preposterous -- see: Short, Thank Goodness!). 

Killing Eve has been billed as the #MeToo Moment thriller, original, different, centering women. 

But it seems to me that it owes most to the very old (by now) Kill Bill, Vols. 1 & 2, 2003 and 2004, in which there are several extremely gruesome set piece fights to the grisley, ghastly finish. In Vol. 1 these take place between Uma Thurman's The Bride's character, and two different Asian killers, and an African American killer.  

Uma Thurman's Bride fights Gogo Yubari as O-Ren Ishii aka Cottonmouth, in Kill Bill Vol. I; totally male-gazey.

The killer antagonists here are played by Lucy Liu and Chiaki Kuriyama, and by Vivica Fox as the African American mom in suburban home complete with small daughter.

Uma Thurman, Kill Bill, Vol. I

Jodie Comer, Villanelle, Killing Eve.

The difference between these and Killing Eve is the reversal that the antagonist is the blonde Uma Thurman look-alike, Jodie Comer's Villanelle, and it is the Asian Sandra Oh's Eve, who is the protagonist. 

Helena, Orphan Black 2013-2017 -- if  you have not yet watched the 5 seasons of Orphan Black, do it now! played as are all the female clones by Tatiana Maslany; definitely not male-gazey.

It also seems that another big influence has been another BBC America series, the truly brilliant and original, most definitely not male-gazey, Orphan Black. Villanelle is another super beautiful feral Russian young woman, super trained to be another super assassin-killer without basic human emotions, except what captures her attention. In Orphan Black's Helena, it is is her clone family 'seestras'; in Killing Eve it is Villanelle's obsession with Eve Polastri. The 'Russian-inflected' English both Helena and Villanelle speak provides a smoke screen, which conceals from the no-where near as intelligent and talented beholder, their feral, joyeous ammorality in wreaking death. 

the French detective of The Tunnel; 3 seasons 2013-2018; not male-gazey, or hardly at all.

French detective, Elise Wasssman, played by Clémence Poésey, in The Tunnel; not male-gazey, or hardly at all.

This might also be owed something from the more recent fixation of other hyper violent television series like the BBC's 3-season The Tunnel (2013-2018) to center other female hyper intelligent and effective characters who are asperger-direct, socially dysfunctional, incapable of concealing or veiling their wants and desires, speaking their opinions of one and all to their faces.

Daryl Hannah as Priscilla in Blade Runner (1982), doing what she does so well; definitely male-gazey.

There also might be a bit in Villanelle too, of Daryl Hannah's Replicant character, Priscilla, from the first Blade Runner film. 

These characters all speak their minds without polite or politic directness, which, of course, women are never supposed to do. Thus viewers' delight, presumably. 

My own sense of Killing Eve is that the sum of its parts amounts to very little. It's only these two women, Secret Service Eve, and assassin-for-hire run by Russians, Villanelle, the series is interested in. We are not even sure by the end if Villanelle ultimately works for the Russian government, a Russian mafia family or our criminal global consortium of big business and government. Nobody seems to be concerned about that. It's Eve's and Villanelle's hunt for each other is the plot. The other characters matter only as far as they aid, abet or interfere with the hunt. 

However, it is effortless entertainment-distraction (see: Amoral,  Light-hearted), without the on-screen Kill Bills' wallow in gore. The worst stuff is all, thank goodness, performed off screen. There's really no nudity or overt sex either, i.e. lack of male-gaze priorities, though there are a variety of male characters . 

There will be will be a season 2 of Killing Eve.

Yes It Has Been A Long Time Since Posting; Sun Tzh and The Art of War + Saratoga

     . . . . I have not posted since the penultimate day of July.  My goodness time does fly when busy with the present, including friends with medical emergencies, and planning the future, of which there is a lot of planning as so much travel is involved, from New Orleans and Texas, to the Caribbean, to Europe -- and lordessa save us, Abu Dahbi.

I have been reading some very interesting books, though, such as this Penguin edition of The Art of War: The Essential Translation of the Classic Book of Life (2009) by Sun=Tzu; Introduction by John Minford; Edited by John Minford; Translated by John Minford.

This edition was chosen because of the Introduction provides historical context and because the editor/translator has included extensive Commentary on the chapters by a variety of Chinese scholars and generals past and present.

These are the chapters of the bare text:

Chapter 1: Making of Plans 
Chapter 2: Waging of War 
Chapter 3: Strategic Offensive 
Chapter 4: Forms and Dispositions 
Chapter 5: Potential Energy 
Chapter 6: Empty and Full 
Chapter 7: The Fray 
Chapter 8: The Nine Changes 
Chapter 9: On the March 
Chapter 10: Forms of Terrain 
Chapter 11: The Nine Kinds of Ground 
Chapter 12: Attack by Fire 
Chapter 13: Espionage 

Last night I watched the Battle of Crecy episode from the television adaptation (2012) of the 14th century historical fiction doorstop, World Without End, by Ken Follett (no one loves rape and humiliation and degradation of women as much as he, not even GRRM).

I kept checking off the aspects of King Edward's plans for Crecy against Sun Tzh's instruction. It included everything Sun Tzu admonishes, about, including when to do or not to do a forced march. I was quite impressed. But then one sees how much all successful historical generals such Caesar, Napoleon and Grant follow his guidelines too, whether they did so consciously or not. The most important aspect evidently is speed of action, because Sun Tzu brings it up often, in more than one section of his advice.  One has noticed that most successful commanders before mechanized warfare and air warfare has rapid movement in common.

I could not help but compare and contrast Grant and Lee with Sun Tzu instructions -- and how Lee in so many ways did not adhere to the Sun Tzu exhortations, while Grant always did. 

Clausewitz had read Sun Tzu it is said. So might have Grant, though he never mentions it. Napoleon is widely thought to have carried the books with him everywhere. The first western translation of The Art of War was 1782, by a Jesuit priest, into French.

Why, since I have read Clausewitz, why had I not read The Art of War? It's so short too, quite unlike Clausewitz. But then, Clausewitz, though seemingly permeated with Sun-Tzu, is also Enlightenment in his approaches (which tends to really make him mostly out-of-date, experts say, for 19th and 20th century warfare -- what about 21st C warfare?), whereas, as mentioned, Sun-Tzh, who may well be the same sort of composite figure as Homer, is for the ages. Though warfare by plane, drone and intercontinental missiles changes everything, doesn't it? 

The Art of War, though so short, may actually be even more dense than Clausewitz, since so much is couched in metaphor that we (well, at least me) of our place and age are not able to quickly and easily penetrate and grasp. 

But I do recall how Grant is / was universally praised for the brevity and clarity of his battlefield plans and orders.

Now I'm thinking of The Art of War in terms of the battles of Saratoga, since as of tomorrow we're on a jaunt with a friend to visit a Postmambo Traveler amigo who lives there.  My two objectives for our mini vacay is to visit the ground where Benedict Arnold pulled the Continental Congress and the as yet unborn nation's chestnuts out of the British military fire, was dreadfully injured, but allowed the French to come in who really pulled the US chestnuts out of the fire -- and then that nasty piece of work, General Gates, stole all the credit for himself, when he earned none -- sulking the whole time in his tent. 

After that I'm going to take the tour of the cottage where Grant finished his Memoirs of the Mexican American War and the War of the Rebellion, one of the greatest works of military history, as great as Julius Caesar's War Commentaries on his Gallic Wars, and one of the United States great works of literature.

I'll probably look at some horses too, and who knows what else? There's no dearth of things to do and see in Saratoga.

Historian Receives Death Threat + Decline of Civil War Reenactments

     . . . . Historian and journalist, Minisha Sineha (her specialty is African American abolitionists and their writing) wrote this piece pointing out what our current administration and POTUS share with Andrew Johnson and his disastrous period in the White House:

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/07/25/opinions/what-happened-the-last-time-a-president-chose-americas-enemies-over-its-friends-sinha/index.html?

She then delineates what is different between then and now:

  Quote Congressional Republicans in the 1860s, tempered in the fire of the Civil War, put their country before a traitorous President. They first passed the Tenure of Office Act of 1867 to protect Republican Cabinet members and office holders from Johnson. When Johnson violated the law by firing Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, congressional Republicans drew up articles of impeachment against him. 
Congressional Republicans today, in contrast, have not lifted a finger to protect Justice Department officials and special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation from the threat of interference by Trump. In fact, they have aided and abetted the Trump administration's undermining of both.

The consequence for writing this piece is that Sinha received a death threat from an individual who knew her home address and other personal information -- cops were able to track him down in about 24 hours. Guess where the guy threatening to kill her lives . . . . 

https://twitter.com/profmsinha?lang=en

Always knew being an honest historian was a dangerous thing. 

Alas, today there are no Grants and Shermans to keep the wrecked ship of state from going under prior to the next election when Johnson was thrown out. 

This is also went up yesterday - today:

"Civil War Reenactors in Decline" in the NY Times -- PAYWALL: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/style/civil-war-reenactments.html?

Focus of the story is the annual Battle of Gettysburg reenactment. Great photos! 

  Quote “Up until the last five or 10 years, the social causes of the war did not come into what we do,” he said. “We were paying tribute to the fighting man.” 

“It wasn’t ‘I’m racist and I want to glorify slavery,’” he said. “Nobody really thought a lot about the social reasons of why the South went to war. It was just these poor guys who were underfed, undermanned, underequipped, fighting valiantly to the last man, until they couldn’t stand anymore.” 

Brad Keefer, a 61-year-old corporal in the Union re-enactor ranks and a professor of history at Kent State University, said: “Re-enactors look at the war as a four-year period between 1861 and 1865 in which you can cut out all the stuff leading up to the war and very much ignore everything that happened afterward.” 
It’s a vision of history placed in narrow context. The military details are meticulously researched and recreated down to the stitching of a uniform, but the broader social and political realities of the Civil War — the profound struggle over slavery and emancipation, racism and equality, citizenship and disenfranchisement — are largely confined to the margins. 

Still, those issues can’t be ignored. After a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where demonstrators wore swastikas and carried Confederate flags, and where an anti-racist protester named Heather Heyer was killed, at least two smaller Civil War re-enactments were canceled. That the battle flag Confederate re-enactors carry is still used as a means of intimidation makes it hard to defend as a purely historical object, independent of its racist implications. 
“You build a comfort zone for the hobby to function,” Mr. Keefer said. Pointing to the Confederate camp, he said: “And give them the benefit of the doubt that they weren’t at Charlottesville.” . . .

This is what happens when ignoring history and / or insisting on lies as history, and constantly pushing them out there as historical truth -- and there is a lot of that withing reenactment.

  Quote Some Confederate re-enactors, including Kenny Glass, 46, an emergency medical technician from Selma, Ala., said that slavery had little to do with Southern secession, an assertion that is at odds with historical scholarship. 

“I’ve been called a racist, a bigot, everything you could think of in the world when people find out I do this,” Mr. Glass said. “I tell them they need to learn their history. It wasn’t fought over slavery. It was fought over Southern rights, that’s just the way I see it.” 
Part of the problem is that the historical beliefs have modern day implications. Scrutiny of Civil War re-enacting from outside — as well as introspection and concern about its future on the inside — reached a fever pitch after the violence last year in Charlottesville, Va. But it built along with protests in many cities that demanded the removal of Confederate statues and monuments from state grounds, spurred by the murder of nine black worshipers in South Charleston, S.C., by the white supremacist Dylann Roof. 

 Last year a pipe bomb was found at a reenactment of the Battle of Cedar Creek (the culminating action in the 1864 Shenandoah Valley Campaign): 

  QuoteA month later, a threat was made against participants in a parade that commemorates Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

So, along with aging out, video games etc., white supremacy terrorism is having an effect on suppressing our Civil War's reenactment participation. 

So one can see why these two pieces of journalism seem to go together, right?  The forces of white supremacy commit  and / or try to commit violence, down to murder, of those they hate and disagree with, even  where innocent children are found.

Yet -- the anti-white supremacy, anti-bigotry, anti-immigration ban, anti-corporate money in elections, anti-voter repression, pro environmental and consumer regulations, pro gun regulation people -- are called uncivil because their words hurt the feelings of white supremacists, etc.

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.

Thinking About Charlottesville

     . . . . No illustrations to this as such gross, contemptible, ugly hatred should be left to the starkness of unadorned language.

It's a miracle there wasn't a full shoot out this weekend this weekend in Charlottesville. 

First -- the people that romperitler says are just the same as the white nationalist neo nazi, neo confederates, white supremacists, etc. were not, surely by choice, not armed with military weapons. They did not bring the violence.  The above named groups came deliberately into someone else's home and brought it.

Second, one guesses an armed shoot-out didn't happen because the intimidation of those who brought being so heavily armed worked. The cops were afraid of the nazis and confederates (though the chief? superintendent? of Charlottesville police later walked back from that implication which he'd put out in his first comments).

But just barely did the shoot-out not happen. The itchy fingers of those white men standing fully armed in front of the Charlottesville synagogue on Saturday during Sabbath services -- terrifying, as the night before of those gangs of armed white men carrying torches marching past, and yelling, "There's the synagogue!"

Ultimately one thinks, however, that the confederate nazis were still, barely, sane enough to realize if they really did start shooting it would go all over the world and they'd lose the pr war that they were hoping this would be, i.e. capturing hearts and minds of we 'norms.' OTOH, however, these guys are now insisting that they were the victims of violence, so if shooting happened it would be the fault of liberals and black lives matter. 

But for the weekened they feasted adequately upon their armed, infantile cosplay. They LOVE rolling around, doing a public strut and fondle of their guns, where all eyes are forced to see their circle jerks, like the guys who masturbate on the subways where little girls are forced to see “it." *

So maybe that was enough for them, barely, at the synagogue, for instance, to keep them from opening fire. 

As well, Virginia has legal open carry, unlike Massachusetts and Boston (which demo for Saturday, isn't supposed to be the same people as in Charlottesville, They Say -- and we'll see), so the authorities in Charlottesville weren't obligated to challenge them. Yes, as many have described, this event was very well organized and their target location for the opening of Act 2 of the take-over of Us All was carefully, consciously chosen. This demonstration could not legally have gone on in a non open carry state. 

Murdering by vehicle was not in the planning. It did set off an aghast, horrified fire storm world-wide, fanned by the romperitler a$$holery. They have attempted to pretend otherwise. Living in their bubbles one suspects they'd over-estimated the support in the US for genocide and slavery.

One rather suspectls that Car Murder Guy couldn't afford the guns and outfits that so many publicly masturbated with in Charlottesville's public and not so public spaces -- they are expensive. He evidently couldn't even afford the shirt that neo-nazi group, Vanguard America wore with their spears and shields, so a shirt was donated to him. Car Murder Guy had to do something to show he was worthy to be one of them. And this, with all the pumped adrenaline sent him ramming into the protesters -- no doubt howling Yeeee Haw! Until he saw what he had really done and then, like every other bully, shyte himself.

But the shooting will come unless these armed demonstrations of hatred, racism and ignorance are shut down by the authorities, right now! Open carry laws are making it inevitable, one thinks. But then, that was a big part of the objective in the push for open carry laws by the ugly white politicos in the first place.

---------------------------------
* The photo of Car Murder Guy even looks like the pervert that during one period in my life when on my way to work in the mornings would hide in the men's toilet on the subway platform (the toilets were still unlocked an available then -- no longer).  He'd run up to me, masturbating.  If he hadn't infuriated me so much, for interrupting my reading, I would have fallen down laughing at how he looked, trying to jerk off and hold on to his pants at the same time. But I got more and more infuriated because, you know, my privacy, my precious moments of reading before getting to work, and thinking about what I was trying to write

This went on for most of the fall, at least three mornings a week.  The MTA attendant wouldn't bother calling the cops. The cops didn't care when I called them myself (no cell phones yet!)  It didn't stop until the morning I was ready and waiting with a barely screwed closed thermos of very hot coffee which ooops, I poured all over his ugly member.

This was in the days when nobody in my neighborhood of retirees and artists, musicians, and musicians, except me) had 9-5 jobs, there were no kids and parents taking them to school, and tourists never came here -- too scared -- so the platforms were always empty at rush hours.  I was always there by myself.  Almost impossible to remember that now, when the whole world is always on the platform at all times of the day and night, all year 'round.

Did Himself Bring Home To Me A Box of Chocolate Truffles?

Charles kills Manfred. Of course  Manfred wasn't killed like this, in a duel.  He did die in the battle, but just how remained mysterious.

No it wasn't a box of chocolate truffles, but something that operates with me just like,  as Himself put it, "a box of chocolate corrupts someone who is on a diet."

I'm supposed to be working on popular culture, politics, etc. from the end of the War to Southern Rebellion to the erasure of slavery, revision of history, etc. and the Rise of the Glorious Lost Cause.  I'm supposed to be reading reams of African American newspapers.  And, btw, this stuff is supremely depressing, as depressing as our current national events horror movie, the roots of which are all in it.

So what does el Vaquero do?

"Hi, look what I found that I bet you're gonna like!!"

It's The Sicilian Vespers: A History of the Mediterranean World in the Later Thirteenth Century by Steven Runciman,. This classic work of history of this period of Sicilian history was first published in 1957 by Cambridge University Press, and reprinted now for the 10th time (2012).  I cannot keep my hands off it.  I'm devouring all this detailed history of the conflicts among the Roman Popes, the eastern Empire, the Arabs, the Holy Roman Empire and its emperors, the French kings, the parade of Henrys, Conrads, Tancred, Manfreds, Fredericks, the Norman kings of Sicily, the marriages with Portuguese and English princesses, Spanish invasion of Italy, crusades and Mameluks. Even more complicated the wars of the Guelphs and Ghibellines are involved so all these personages are in Dante's circles of hell too.  And, la the pièce de résistance -- the MONGOLS!  Ooo la lah, things were a'poppin' in the 13th century.  And Sicily was right in the center of it, as Sicily is the stepping stone between Europe and Africa, between west and east.

Church of the Holy Spirit in Palermo, site of the Vespers Uprising.

As for what are -- or rather what was the Sicilian Vespers, and why it matters -- it was the rebellion of Easter 1282, in which Sicily got rid of -- slaughtered - 3000 French.  But ultimately all this was about the war between the Hohenstaufans and the Pope for control of Italy.  This was called the War of the Sicilian Vespers.


So many incredible characters, so many amazing deeds, many of which were downright evil, and a few heroic.  No wonder there are operas made of them; see, for instance Rossini's Tancredi.

My friend, who also is my hair person. has relatives in Sicily.  She, who is not that much interested in history in general, knows of The Vespers.  We dreamed together yesterday of going to Sicily together.  I've never been there, and neither has she.

Reading this book, it's like going on vacation, but safely, into the very unsafe time and place of 13th century Mediterranean life.