Keepin' the Home Fires Burning

     . . . . Could this actually be a week in which decent people can have some joy?  The retreat from Kherson, inflation seeming to have hit peak, our midterms giving us the "Something not turning as out as bad as it could necer felt so good."

Somehow, the three feel related, along with the outcomes of both Colombia's and Brasil's presidential elections. Even so, I'm probably centering, wrongly, the US here?

OTOH, covid infections are increasing like mad here.  Glad I did the late autumn hair stylist visit early.  Also we are going back to NO next week.  Back in time for Thanksgiving with some friends -- who had covid, but are over it  But we won't have the usual second Thanksgiving we usually have with other friends, as they both have covid presently.  Pax is doing its job, but as one is so run down from years of caregiving and job, and the other is still recovering from emergency brain surgery, it's not so easy.

Another amiga has been subjected to round after round of chemo since June/July. She and I have email discussions about the books and television likes we have in common. The latest was around learning we both had liked The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005) by Megan Marshall, is another of those biographies that work beautifully for me as well. I've read it, in fact, three times. 

Sophia Hawthorne was one of the sisters. She spent her life in Boston being sick, unable to walk or do housework.  The only treatment that worked for what ailed her was spending the winter in Cuba on a hacienda.  The further her ship got from the Boston, the better she felt, until, by the time she reached Cuba, she was quite, quite well.  She adored spending her mornings a-gallop on spirited horses of her host, across the river valley fields. Then, returning to Boston, the closer her ship got to US shores, and the closer to Boston, the more unwell she became.

 Reading this in the biography back then, sent me looking for Sophia's journals, and I found some material that el  V was able to use in his Cuba And Its Music. Sophia Hawthorne was as racist and non-condemning of slavery as she could be, without coming right out and saying she believed slavery was a positive institution, but she was observant, so there were bits that were of use. Her remarks on the enslaved form part of the unlovely picture of our nation's history of Black hatred. 

I want to blame her husband, since Sophia's sisters were quite concerned with slavery and abolition.  Nat. Hawthorne, though, was quite a piece of work. All his life he was in bromance with Franklin Pierce, and, even, quite possibly, his lover.  Hawthorne wrote Pierce's presidential campaign political bio for excellent pay, received sinecure government posting from Pierce, was with him on his deathbed -- he asked for him, not Sophia -- was totally in the slaveocracy's pockets.  Hawthorne was vocally anti-abolitionist, and decisively told people discussions of slavery were boring and a waste of time, and he didn't care about slavery one way or the other.  Quite out-of-step with fellow Concordians.  Though Sophia's Cuban trips began before she knew Hawthorne, of course, so it was more like-to-like than caused by Hawthorne. My, this book, and the experience of it, like everything before 2016 and covid feels far, far away in time.  

Coincidence: as I finished Sister Novelists, another biography of sisters appears --a new book about the Grimkés: The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery In An American Family, by Kerri Greenidge.  It seems to be a study intended to debunk their reputations as anti-slaverites -- the review I read suggests they profited immensely from slavery.

So, this morning, receiving the news the library had The Grimkés available, I dashed off to the library to pick it up, because it wasn't raining much, despite we being in Tropical Storm Nicola predicted wind and rain. I knew it was Veterans Day, but didn't stop to think this is a holiday and the libraries are closed.  Duh.  I'm smart that way.  Though I was wearing the rain-snow-storm boots I got last week, so I'm not so dumb that way!  Had on rain coat and carried umbrella too.  Which was good because the storm hit hard as I was returning home, due to the fog and heavy cloudfs, dark came even earlier than the roll back of EDST makes it. We're currently in fog, as well as dark, since the temps are fairly warm -- in the 60's. Well stocked with what we need, and even what we want, we are happily cozy and comfortable.  How lucky can we get?

The week was quite lively, while we ignored the pre-election and pre-results backbenching with all our hearts.  El V did another Postmambo Zoom last night, this time with live guest and his film,  from Lome, in Togo, Africa.    He also went out to several music gigs, and we taught two classes.  

Hope the internet stays on -- it's gone out twice now in less than 24 hours.  If no problems I plan to watch more Crown, season 5, 2022. This is the season to turn the mythologies of Di and Charlie inside out. The first two eps dull and dreary.  The actor doing Di is lacking in all that made cameras and screens bewitched by her.  We see her being acidly mocking and mean, o so not quite subtly (due to the bile and acid of bulimia?). It got interesting in the 3rd episode which was generally only about the Al-Fayed family and the man who was the Duke of Windsor’s valet until death – Fayed sr. hires Black Barbadian, Sydney Johnson, whom the Duke had taught everything that makes an English gentleman.  According to the show, Johnson was the one who advised Al-Fayed to buy palace estate, Villa Windsor, decaying on the outskirts of Paris – and Harrods Department Store, then finally buy some position in a most prestigious equine something or other so he can sit next to, and, finally, meet and speak with the Queen. Queenie’s not about to allow this unworthy vulgarian colonial his reward. She and her Equerry send Diana instead. The Princess insults him, and they get along famously.  Di and Elizabeth are equally nasty in this sequence. Later, at E’s court, the members eagerly check with each other as which possessions in the Villa belong to Them/the Crown/ -- and they go over the lists with the same avid attention any grocer would go over his delivery lists and invoices.  The Court looks small and grasping, petty and avaricious. And, always, deadly dull.

The other character is Charles (now Kingwingy Charles III). Played as he is by Dominic West – as Charlie then as now lacks all charisma, electricity and interest, whilst West can’t help splattering it everywhere just standing around -- this doesn’t work. Can you imagine The Wire's Jimmy McNulty having a temper tantrum over a ... pen?  No, we cannot, but Charlie did. Immediately on being king, even not yet crowned. 

If Charlie was in the least like West’s presentation, none of the messes would have happened in the first place.

So, history's revisionism continues apace, even revisionism of what we've 'always known' because we were there.  Ha!

Is This the First US Science Fiction Novel? The Partisan Leader

      . . . .  Science Fiction, published very early in the United States of America, is a confederate novel by a Virginian, who was a passionate advocate for slavery.  

The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverly Tucker (male; 'Beverly' is a common male surname and first name in earlier decades among the Aristo class in VA, SC, etc., particularly those descended from pre-Independence VA ), under the pseudonym of Edward William Sidney.  After losing election campaigns in two states, Missouri and Virginia, Tucker's well-connected friends and family got him appointed as professor of Constitutional Law at William and Mary -- his father held the position before him. As we see, this gave Tucker copious free time to write novels (while waited on hand-and-foot by enslaved labor): his first novel, George Balcombe was also published in 1836. *. 

He employed his additional leisure time to write political pro-southern slave state secession, economy and power tracts. Thus, as one likely would expect, this, if not the first, one of the first sf novels -- the novel is set 13 years in the future from the year in which it was published -- would be a romance centered on Virginia, about slavery,  a successful Southern secession from, and confederation against, the dastardly North, which Happy Ending turns the entire Western hemisphere into a vast slave state.

Tucker lived in those halcyon decades in which the Southern Plantation class ruled the Federal government from the White House all the way down, planning to expand slavery as the economic system throughout the Western Hemisphere, while defending it from the heinous designs of Britain, "the Great Apostle of Emancipation”. This 'design' was to destroy the Southern cotton economy in favor of their own in India (which Britain did not have and wasn't trying to have then), while invading the United States with an army of Africans and those freed from bondage out of Cuba, Haiti, Brasil, etc..

 

One of Tucker's  best friends was Virginian, Abel P. Upshur, who was contributing his bit to expansion and defense by building a navy that could successfully take on Britain's.  The photo above is the USS Abel P. Upshur (DD-193), a Clemson-class destroyer in the service of the United States Navy and United States Coast Guard until -- IRONY!  IRONY! IRONY! --  transferred to the United Kingdom in 1940. During World War II, she served in the Royal Navy as HMS Clare.

The Partisan Leader can be read on the Documenting the South website here. 

* Incidentally, as a point of interest in the history of American Literature, it was reviewed by this southerner, Edgar Allan Poe.

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     . . . . This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (2016) by Matthew Karp "illuminates this era of American history with an intelligent survey of those Southern politicians and their ambitions, both at the regional level and the federal level. “By the middle of the [19th] century,” he writes, “southern masters ruled over the wealthiest and most dynamic slave society the world had ever known.”

Their leaders were nationalists, not separatists. Their “vast southern empire” was not an independent South but the entire United States, and only the election of Abraham Lincoln broke their grip on national power. Fortified by years at the helm of U.S. foreign affairs, slaveholding elites formed their own Confederacy—not only as a desperate effort to preserve their property but as a confident bid to shape the future of the Atlantic world.

 Calhoun's policy was to insure the power of the agrarian South by limiting the power of the federal government. "That section distinct from the rest of the nation, however, eventually aimed to create its own Confederate States of America and then export that confederacy. The result would be a Southern Empire."

The consequence? The failure or success would depend upon southern statesmen advancing that world through United States foreign policy. “Few mid-nineteenth-century Americans,” he writes, “were more deeply engaged with international politics than southern slaveholders.” Those in positions of power, southern elites, also kept the international politics of slavery under constant surveillance, “tracking threats to slave property . . . monitoring oscillations in global attitudes toward emancipation.”

"Given that global perspective, there was little in the southern “institution” that was “peculiar.” During those antebellum decades, the blunt facts illustrate a vise-like grip on the presidency, the cabinet, and the lower levels of federal administration. Professor Karp quotes Iowa Congressman Josiah Grinnell, who observed that during those antebellum years southern slaveholders held the Secretary of State office for two-thirds of the time."

In their minds, Great Britain’s 1833 Slavery Abolition Act was part of the nefarious design to destroy them.  This accounts for the region's adamant anti-British policy in all things up until the War of the Rebellion.

I do believe though, the author is mistaken when he describes these Southerners as "cosmopolitan, highly educated and sophisticated -- because their fundamental tenets were made of contradiction. They were firmly convinced Britain schemed to destroy them economically for it's own economic benefit.  Yet, these leaders also assumed, presumed and expected Britain to support and assist and finance their Great War of the Rebellion. It could have no choice, they were certain, because Britain's industry depended on King Cotton.

Goes to show, again, that the current crops of racist conspiracists, delusionists, climate and election deniers, disseminators of lies and fakery and outright insanity come from a vast pedigree in our national history of determined violence to rid themselves of government and have their own preferred systems of cruel, selfish greed.

Hooray For the Tulips! Gilded Age Screens and History in Books!

      . . . . These weeks of below freezing temperatures are good for three very important things:

1) Kills off many strains of bacterias unfriendly to humans and other living beings;

2) Kills off mosquito larvae!

3) Tulips!  Bulbs need days of seriously cold weather underground to burst their dormancy before they can explode in all their glory.

     . . . Still, it is cold, which tends to keep one inside despite having those terrific respirator N95 masks that prevent one's lenses from fogging over, and even though one is fortunate enough to have all the right things to wear outside in below freezing weather, still in possession of easy mobility, while being perfectly comfortable temperature-wise.

     . . . . Fortunately lots of tv to watch and books to read.  

So Many say Julian Fellowes, he brought us the wildly popular Downtown Abbey, has struck out with The Gilded Age, which premieres tonight on HBO. If he has indeed struck out, my theory will be (though I do not swear to stick to that theory) is that he's got Cynthia Nixon playing a sweet, but feisty, spinster sister to an old Dutch aristo glum bitch snob, who wants NO NEW  MONEY HERE! ROBBER BARONS DEPART THESE PRECINTS WHERE I AM NOW! This, when Nixon's simultaneously appearing on HBO in the Sex And the City sequel series, And Just Like That, playing a middle-aged woman who falls madly in lust with a younger hotter than hot Irish-Mexican, non-binary lesbian butch-bitch, and thus blows up her marriage.  Also a couple of years after a risible run to be ... get this, folks! ... governor of the state!  But then, considering the clownships the last governors have been, perhaps that is too harsh on Cynthia Nixon (but still I'm sticking with my own theory that she's often a much better actor than she'd ever have been as governor).

Among the many things to watch I will be checking out The Gilded Age despite the media already telling me to miss it.

Media faux ‘discussion’ about Fellowes’s debut HBO series often includes mentions of other films/tv set (roughly) in the era, always starting with Scorsese's adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1993), part of his life-long work of putting (his) historical NYC on film. Unlike Fellowes's series, all of such films are adapted from novels, and so many of them part of the classic American Fiction canon. The other thing to keep in mind as contrast with Fellowes's series, is none of them were written for that marketing classification that publishing has labeled "Historical Fiction."

All of them were written by people who were part and parcel of the era about which they were writing -- it wasn't history, but the their present day lives, even if the time of the novel had succeeded by another era by the time it was published, such as Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920).  

I regret the second part of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women is left out of the list, particularly that week house party which open Meg's eyes to the realities of the age's marriage market. OTOH the only Little Women screen adaptation that even included the party was the latest, right before the pandemic. I also regret that no one has  thought of adapting for the screen several other Alcott works (which incidentally all are set in this Gilded Age and remark on its morals and mores, such as Eight Cousins, its sequel Rose in Bloom -- almost a harping on the excess of the era -- as is An Old-Fashioned Girl -- or the sequels to Little Women,  Little Men and Jo’s Boys. 

At the same time, these media writers don't include  Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and his Sister Carrie, both of which had films made from them too.  But then, they're in b&w, and don't have that kind of opulence of pretty things for our eyes to wallow in.

However, thanks to the BBC, Merchant-Ivory, Jane Campion and other fine directors, we have an entire set of on-screen adaptations from Henry James's many novels’ fractal examination of the manners and mores of the era!

     . . . . So many Fine Books to read to keep me from the cold of disenfrancisement and enforced isolation coz all the covidiots -- though lucky for us, our numbers for new infections are dropping, Yay.

Back to books. Currently reading:

Washington At the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery (2021) by Bruce A. Ragsdale; 

The Bright Ages : A New History of Medieval Europe (2021) by Matthew Gabriele & David M. Perry.

What a unfortunate title! like that attempt to counter Grimdark with Noble Bright -- o gods! -- and how so many other terms so common in titles and labels are used so incorrectly, like HopePunk -- kiddos do you even know that punk was exactly about not having hope, that the future is only dystopian?, or for that matter, Blues, Jazz or Gumbo. It's as though the authors of their Bright Ages are determined to believe the 450's -800 are no different from 15th and 17th centuries -- and what about the centuries that come between?  They use Dark Ages and Medieval interchangeably. Argh! 

Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain (2020 -- just available in the US) by Padraic X. Scanlan

Yes, one must tell them this because even today, in the year 2022, the UK outside of Ireland that is, refuse to admit it.  See, even published just today in the UK Guardian, a review of Capitalism and Slavery by Dr. Eric Williams, written at Oxford in 1938, one of the first books I read, back in the 1980's, that shaped to this day my thinking on the subject of Atlantic-New World slave trade and slavery and how it made the capitalist system possible, and financed the Industrial Revolution. Plus, see the first title in this list of four!

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire (2022) by Jonathan M. Katz.

As he is writing about places and events I know very well, including having been in Cuba and all those locations many, many times, he's been caught out as wrong on a few things, but it's a fascinating, enlightening and useful book. Let's just not let being a journalist get one to thinking one is an historian. Among his journalist's expertise though, for which I'm grateful, Katz does a thorough job of describing the attempt to fascist reichwing, supremacist rich white to coup the US government with the same sorts of groups and financing that brought both Hitler and Mussolini to power -- all legally (Franco did by military conquest; they did not) -- and how we have the same sorts of groups right now, operating in exactly the same manner as with Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.

 

 

The Dark Ages On Three Kings Day

     . . . . Today is Three Kings Day, the day which begins the count down to Mardi Gras. 

In Roman Catholic countries, and here, in New Orleans, we eat King Cake.  We have some, from Mille Feuille, our local French bakery -- which makes all the very best of everything that it makes.  It feels all the more important to observe King's Day since, for a very long time, 01/6/21 will be thought of on this date, in the USA  

Mardi Gras's comin', BAAAAAAAAAABEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Doncha fergit it!

In the meantime, even in the Dark Ages, surely, at least in the monasteries, Three Kings Day a/ka/ Epiphany was observed.
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     . . . . A long time ago, 1938 in fact, Robert Graves, who made the Empress Livia live forever, thanks to his character of Emperor Claudius, the BBC, and actor Derek Jacobi, way back in 1972, published an historical novel of another age, a different Roman Empire, a newish religious era, titled Count Belisarius.

For newcomers to these names, Commander Belisarius is an historically lauded general of the 6th C -- 505 - 565. He was part of the times that historians have called Europe's "Dark Ages." This is the century that has been the favorite chronological location for Britain's King Arthur.

Looking through this so readable novel, it differs in so much from what the current historians of his time and actions I've been reading for the last ten years.  This was another effective military commander badly treated by a fearful, jealous Byzantine emperor. But even so, Graves seems to be wrong, deliberately or otherwise, about much of even the small, basic stuff we do know about the Commander.  For one thing, Graves has chosen, according to himself, to present this story as a Legend, a Romance in the mode of the Arthurian cycles as written in the Medieval period.  Partly that is due to Graves depending on Procopius as his major source -- as do all, of course, including respectable historians -- but Procopius is infamous for all the axes he grinds in his Secret History, his prejudices, his personal antagonisms, his conscious pay-back and sheer malicious joy in blackening reputations. Though he loved Belisarius, oooo how he hated the Empress Theodora!

Unlike Graves's two Claudian novels, which I've read several times, this is a first read of Count Belisarius. I'm starting to think  Gore Vidal's Julian (the Apostate) - 1964, and Robert Harris's Cicero Trilogy, were influenced by this earlier book, particularly with Vidal's structure, and Harris's choice for narrator.

It's been a bright spot in these damned Omicron-coupled-with-insane politico clowns weeks, to feel I've finally gotten something of a handle on the Gothic, Vandal and Hunnic wars of the 5th century, and some of the 6th century, for both the western and the eastern empires (which, by the end of the 5th century, the western empire was in the agony that transformed it into the states that became Europe). 

I'm really understanding why it is so many archaeologists and historians warn, "Be grateful you were not born in the 6th , 7th -- a century that brought Bubonic Plague to Constantinople and Europe, among all the other ordeals and horrors -- and 8th centuries -- though honestly, for So Many, the 5th and 9th + centuries don't look all that good either. At least in the 9th century Europe got Charlemagne and his dreams of a unity Christendom (he failed, as Christianity and all religions fail at that sort of unity), culture, civilization and knowledge.

I'm trying to get a firmer grip on the Goths in the Danubian lands, Italy, Africa, Gaul and Iberia prior to the Arab explosion in the 7th century. So dark, the written information so scarce -- and all of it biased as heck

I do not think I shall ever get even a slippery grip on the Persians -- there were so many iterations of the Persians, starting so far back, and going on for many eras.  So very very VERY many eras. To this day so many in Iran speak Farsi-Persian, as well as speakers of Dari Persian throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Looking at the stat NYC covid map: there are large parts of the boroughs that are more than 50% infected -- or just positive?  They don't tell us that. Our nation hit 1,000,000 new cases today.  Yes.  One MILLION. So, we are not at all out and about these days. 

Plus. it's cold here.

Though not as frigid as it will be the weekend, and this weekend won't be as frigid as next week.  Tomorrow morning we have Maybe Snow. Tonight we're doing serious comfort food for dinner.

Some hearty red Spanish wine.    

Learning the Craft From the Greats Gone Before + Weather

      . . . . In a sense this is a follow-up comment to the observations concerning Anthony Horowitz's Hawthorne and Horowitz mystery/crime series, and Andrea Camelleri's final novel in his very long Comissario Montalbano series, writers teaching writers how to write.

     . . . . Iconic US author Joan Didion passed away December 23, 2021, of Parkinson's and being 87. Since the announcement, I've been pondering her work, which, if it were music, could justifiably be said was a soundtrack to the years I have observed play out in this same nation her fiction recorded.  Perhaps not the only soundtrack -- there's the entire playbook of alternative soundtracks from out of Spanish and African heritage people handling things differently, but Didion's was the one that underscored the major themes of violence, cruelty, lies, isolation, betrayed hope and refusal of responsibility -- our national white, determination as white people since the Vietnam War, to never grow up, to remain forever immature, and expect every wish to be instantly gratified, that there won't be consequences for selfish harms inflicted upon others, even the planet -- and above all, our national god given right to be FAAAAAAYMOUS! Most of all, our national delusion that WE/ME can never die.

 In many ways, I feel, she was the real and only inheritor of Hemingway’s mantle, the only American writer who understood his diction, his syntax, his rhythms, how and why he used them. She was able to make that authentically her own too, through diligent, brilliant, long study and practice.  She, being she, wasn’t distracted by the bs of the masculinity cult, of winning and losing, as were other writers -- not surprisingly, all male -- who were determined to wrest Hemingway’s mantle for themselves, such as Norman Mailer.

For which, it seems, there were women who wrote, who would forever resent Didion (ironically, quoted in The New Yorker, for which both did write):

“Ridiculously swank,” Pauline Kael described the novel “Play It as It Lays.” “I read it between bouts of disbelieving giggles.”

 

Anthony Perkins, Tuesday Weld, Play It As It Lays (1972)

But yet, dear Pauline, no book of yours was adapted for your beloved films, and nobody ever asked you to write a script.

Alas, though, you both died of Parkinson's.  RIP, both of you.

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     . . . . Why, yes, it is January.  All month.  A nasty weather wise, which is the normal for NYC,  health wise, where once ya, flu and colds, but now, holy cow Omicron in combination with an utter idiot as NYC's mayor -- can you believe I am missing Bill de Blasio???????-- psychologically-wise, utterly despairing, as tomorrow is the first anniversary of the first all-out violent coup attempt, with many more being planned.

I did manage to get myself out today, early, to Trader Joe's for certain essentials, and then to the library to pick up Holds.  This despite the rain.  At least today the bitter cold is in abeyance, though it is scheduled to return even more bitter, after the Maybe Snow here Thursday night - Friday morning.  Good to have the milk, eggs and sour dough bread here already, as the already borked supply lines and deliveries have been further borked by the Big Snow that happened in and around D.C.    That TJ's sliced sour dough makes the best toast!

Well back to fund-raising planning for Tierra Sagrada.

The Merry Month of Vaporous May

      . . . .  Much cooler today – 60’s, not the high 80’s of the last week.  This is the longest stretch without rain since the drought of 2012.  I hope the rain indicated for the weekend materializes. 

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WHERE WE ARE

The messages, social and professional, arriving in from people coming to NYC for various reasons, starting last week, who want to get together, increase every day. Right on annual schedule too, people are already arriving here from other states and countries for Gay Pride.

Well, They Declared the City completely open as of last week.  So I guess we're open, all right.  Everyone sounds so excited, while my own feelings are ... well, things don't seem to have changed for me very much.  Except the noise and horror of the restaurants get worse and worse.  Thursday the entire community, even other restaurants who get frequently cited for over-crowding and noise, had to call the police several times, because Laduree was so insanely beyond the pale. 

Then a second building on Bleecker Street, meaning also a whole lot of homes, within three weeks, went out, due to fire.  The fire department just couldn't get to the fire in time to save anything -- because of the goddamned realestaterestaurant covid sheds blocking all the streets and sidewalks.  I said this was inevitable, but was not allowed to vocalize this or write it by those I attempted to address who are responsible for this insanity in first place, which They insist is permanent and the best thing that every happened to NYC.

Politicians here locally racing to promise full, in person, public school education this fall. But to even minimally adhere to health issues, starting with distance, we need far more classrooms, thus more teachers and more buildings.  The kids may or may not be required to be vaccinated in the age groups for which vaccine is available, but teachers and staff are not -- across the board, from all the mayoral hopeful candidates. Sure, yes! they all say!  We will hire teachers to take the place of those who for health reasons do not wish to return in the fall. 

It's like these jerkwaddie politicians, despite all them boasting their own parenthood, have no idea how miserably teachers are treated and have been for decades.  Even before the pandemic teachers were quitting.  Enrollment in education depts. are way down.  Why go into so much debt to get  job that pays shyte, in which one is personally and as a member of a group treated like shyte, having to balance all the cray cray of conflicting local political, religious and cultural bs -- none of which have anything to do with educating anyone in anything. Additionally, ALL these jerkwaddie politicians, beginning with the current mayor, blithely opine how among other work this fall, teachers must be prepared to play counselor to All the Kids' traumas from the pandemic, integrate them back into socialization in groups, proper behavior and on and on.  Not a mention of course that the teachers themselves may very well have plenty of trauma from the pandemic, not to mention already being burned out working out how to handle the myriad of troubles and problems they've had to deal with in the virtual realm of education and dealing with the children.

It's as though these jerkwaddies think teachers, like nurses, are a magical, ever naturally renewing resources, that they can just say, "More," and immediately materializing are all the needed teaches, with all the skills, socialization, expertise, experience and love that are to keep our kids healthy, safe from crazies with guns, and fulfill every specific need of every specific student, of the, how many students they are to deal with every day. But we crow about all the money we're pouring into the restaurant businesses and bringing back tourism. Nothing for people who LIVE here and contribute instead of mere exploiting and extracting. 

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BOOKS

The two books that have enthralled me these last weeks are Will Rosen's Justinian's Flea: The First Great Plague and the End of the Roman Empire (2007), and A.N. Wilson's Charles Darwin: Victorian Mythmaker (2017).  

Justinian Flea's a re-read, this time aloud, with el V, at bedtime. He'd not read it before and is fascinated by the content, which ranges from how the architects created the Hagia Sophia, to in graphic, grisly, scientific detail the operation of the flee that propagates the Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for Bubonic Plague.

Charles Darwin is an examination of the naturalist's construction of his genius and his theories, and all the many others in the field who contributed, all with in the deep and broad context that is the Victorian eras in which they all operated.  This one received outraged and scathing reviews from many, all insisting everything Wilson wrote is wrong.  However, as I'm now nearly finished with Charles Darwin, and I too know a very great deal in depth and breadth of the Victorian eras, politically, culturally and intellectually, with a lot of knowledge of the figures involved, which I've been acquiring since about age 16. These critics often seem to have read something else, or out of the context within which Wilson is writing -- and Darwin himself is writing.  But not always. There are contradictions that Wilson makes often to his own arguments. He writes very well, so there is this additional pleasure, as well as knowing a great deal, of arguing with the author, so this has been a joy to read.

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SCREENS

I've watched a lot of Acorn TV this month.  Three non-Acorn screen works have made a particular mark on my hour after dinner watching.

First is Mare of Easttown, featuring Kate Winslet as the centered character of Mare.  As this contained mini series hasn't yet concluded, that's all I'll say for now, other than I am liking it enormously.  I'll explain why, once it finishes -- if the finale lives up to the previous episodes, that is. 

The second Big Watch is the 4th, the latest season of the Neapolitan series, Gomorrah. It's a long one, in a way that usually UK and US series no longer are. Have only reached the 5th episode. Like Mare of Easttown, Gomorrah, which began on Netflix, is on HBO.

The third worthy watch is via Netflix, Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold (2017) Joan Didion’s life and times.  It is a fascinating watch on a variety of levels, not only because it centers, w/o ever vaunting/saying it, one of the few public intellectuals and commentators of the last 1/2 of the 20th century's USA, who is a woman -- and didn't come out of academia. The establishment of the non-academia affiliated New York Review of Books, did so much for her profile. It was a different time for writer-thinker-journalists, with so many outlets, including Look Magazine, for exhibiting their ideas.  None of that exists now. 

Didion's  trajectory and perspective on so much is not part of Gloria Steinem's, or the clown, Germaine Greer's.  IOW, like Susan Sontag, Didion didn't begin with, or arrive at her ground-breaking career, via the propellant of self-identifying as a member of any overtly political feminist group or organization, or even academia. Which is fascinating in its own right, because like many other ground-breaking, high achieving women before 'Feminism', in other ages, Didion was stalwartly supported and encouraged by a parent, in Didion's case, her mother.

It certainly helped, that like Steinem, cameras loved both Didion and Sontag.

~~~~~~~~~

HOW IT IS 

It's been busy, and very productive here all month, yet I persist feeling unanchored, free-floating.  I keep wondering who am I? who are we? as a city, as a nation, as human beings? Will my very ill friend survive, or will there be yet another loss long betimes?   My sense is that we are all falling further and further and further behind reality.

Sally Go Round the Roses*

      . . . . A third consecutive beautiful May morning!  

    

Yesterday I saw this year's first roses.  The green of the foliage in Washington Square Park and LaGuadia Place was nearly overwhelming, so fresh and vigorous.

Though I continue double-masking, even in the street, unless sitting quietly with a friend outdoors, yesterday was as perfect as a day can be These Days. It began with the third substantial unexpected check this week out of past music-book-movie work.  I had activities all day!

Walked to meet up for a sort of lunch-picnic with librarian friends in the garden of the Jefferson Market branch library, whose garden is famous for its roses. 

Continued on to Best Buy, went inside and purchased a protector-cover-stand for the new Tablet el V got me on Sunday.  Walked up to Union Square, got croissants in the Green Market. For once I ignored nutrition, fiber, fat, sodium, sugar, and gave the mouth what the mouth wants. 

Turned around and entered DSW, rode the escalator to the shoe department, where I tried on quite a few, and purchased a pair of sandals and a pair of sneakers. Enjoyed the later afternoon sunshine, stopped at LaGuardia Place to rest, chatting with amigo K for half an hour about books and the Gwendolyn Midlo Hall event later in the night, organized by Postmambo, CubaNOLA, in company with the American Studies Department at Berkeley, and the Institute of Gulf Studies (which el V's early work on New Orleans and Cuba had quite an influence of awareness of the Gulf itself as a geography and culture that is not the Carribean, despite the flow and currents) at Tulane.  K, with C and MIL attended the Webenair, as did nearly 200 others, among whom were a lot of friends, whom we've not seen yet in person. It was a wonderful event, providing great satisfaction, judging by the emails last night and this morning.

The occasion was the publication, as of May 11th, of Gwen's memoir, Haunted By Slavery: A Memoir of a Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle.

Today is good too -- and even warmer, as tomorrow is supposed to be. The mayor announced that as of today our city has the .lowest rate of Covid-19 positivity in 7 months -- under 2%.  O my.

I haven't had days like this in over two years, since the weather had been wintery already in 2019 mid-late fall.  I was so happy-giddy by bedtime last night it was like the ecstatic inebriation when 20. 

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

*

The Jaynettes 1963 "Sally Go Round the Roses" is followed by Grace Slick's version.

Long Time Gone: Emergence

      . . . . It's May 7th!  Nor has there been a post here since last month, on the 14th.  I guess . . . things just happen . . . or don't happen?

True, a great deal has happened, while it continues to feel as though nothing is happening -- which that latter is untrue, that nothing is happening, because a lot has gone down and is happening  and is going to happen, from dental appointments to planning the end-of-June trip to . . .  Miami . . . in fulfillment of the grant provided to perform discographic research in the Diaz-Ayala Collection.  Not one's preference for first plane trip in 16 months, etc., but one goes where the materials are, when creating a syllabus for a Discography Studies, a program that has never ever existed. 

Next week Postmambo and NOLA Reconnect host, in cooperation with The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and University of California, Berkeley- American Studies, A Conversation With Gwendolyn Midlo Hall:

Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle

Thursday, May 13, 2021 / via Zoom / 8 pm Central Daylight Time (9 pm Eastern)

Invite link: https://tulane.zoom.us/j/93931683186?pwd=bEcrMFhUYUMzajBTWnRJdVpkMklXdz09

Please join us in celebrating together with pathbreaking historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall the publication of her long-awaited memoir, Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle.

From the Haymarket press release:

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history.  

 Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood.

    Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States.

    Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

Produced by NOLA Reconnect, Postmambo Studies, and CubaNOLA Arts Collective, in association with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley American Studies. Admission is free.

Then there's always Postmambo Movie Night, which needs a lot of attention to set-up so the subscribers can have a smooth experience.

We're embarked upon planning and organizing a major move of books and music materials out of the apartment, which includes the use of professionals of all sorts. And the shredder.  I'm selling all the sf/f to a group who do very well with pop-up used bookshops in Brooklyn; they are desperate for stock.  Certain research groups will be kept, but more of them are going to be sold off, as how things are now we can't even access them, and it's highly unlikely we'll be writing any more books on these topics either.

Shopping / errands take a lot of time. My latest is shopping for a tablet, as the small computer is reaching the very end of its life.  It will be nice to have something that small, light and portable on which I can download books from the library and write and receive e-mail and have access to the internet.

We've also been very carefully initiating a slight approximation of social life, so far only with friends we know with absolute certainty are fully vaccinated, and who are doing the same. It has been very difficult to do this, which came as a shock. Thus this sense that nothing is happening.  Fortunately it seems just about everyone we know is going through this too, so we all understand each other, and there are no hurt feelings.  We'll get there certainly by the time it is warm enough to be comfortably outside at night.  None of us has any desire to meet in covid sheds or inside the restaurants.

It all feels just as weird now and hard to comprehend as it did a year ago at this time, but weird in a different way. Then we were closed down, really closed down, including a curfew. No covid sheds, no restaurant service at all except pick-up/take-out.  No library grab and go. No doctor appointments except emergencies, very emergency emergencies. Now we are very slowly attempting to come out of our cave-bubble, go shopping in real stores -- why yes, even with the tablet I've done research / comparison shopping places like Best Buy and in Apple (where one must have an appointment, as well as a mask in order to enter), buying jeans, since those from over a year ago fall off now, t-shirts and so on. 

Though the right dish drainer remains, evidently an impossibility. Moreover any place that has dish drainers has only a single variety, and it invariably is too small, is not wrongly designed for my space, which isn't, let me emphasize, is not a weird space for a dish drainer.  Cannot find one with a drainage tray that faces the right direction, fits the space, is not attached to the dish rack, large enough, no matter what.  I'm on the third one, which el V brought home the other day, and sure 'nuff, he didn't check, and the drain tray faces the wrong direction. 

But all around us, from Canada and Michigan to Mexico and Latin America, India and other places, the virus is burning down the house and a new variant seems to emerge every day -- while here the mayor and the governor race to be the one to open up the most the fastest and first w/o any restrictions of any kind -- and bring back All The Tourists, at least "36 million by the end of 2021."  One of the attractions?  Get a free vaccination injection, just walk in and probably get a Broadway ticket as swag.  This while pedestrian deaths from speeding cars, bicycles and scooters is already higher by this month than it has been in decades.

Now tell me this isn't weird.

Books - Mundanity - Movie Night

      . . . . Continuing to read with increasing pleasure Sybille Bedford's A Visit to Don Antonio: A Mexican Journey, which she and her girlfriend? lover? companion? all of the above, made from NYC, where they'd been living, initially to Mexico City, from where they began moving outwards, in 1953.  

Leon Trotsky's house in Coyocán, where he was assassinated in 1940.

 With his gravestone,
the house is now a museum, though it wasn't yet when Sybille Bedford visited.

Another Coyocán resident, Frida Kahlo, was still living, barely. She died in 1954

I'm rather baffled how to delineate why this book is something I'm liking so much.  Partly because the events happened so far in the past now as to be an historical resource, partly because I've been to some -- not all -- of the places she and E go to (E. is what Bedford discreetly names her in the narrative).  I've also taken buses across Mexico, on the very route between Vera Cruz and Mexico City, though my first class, complete with wifi, a selection of television programs, films and music -- and air conditioning -- was surely much more luxurious than theirs. Bedford love-hate for air conditioning is an ongoing motif, which I enjoy. That's only of of the concerns her list-of-every-detail-compulsion which runs through the narrative.  Her compression of the history of Maximillian in Mexico to a single paragraph sparked in me no end of admiration, done almost entirely as a list.

As if I didn't have already and amply supply of books to read right now, today picked up from the library the latest Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti mystery, Transient Desires (2021).  This is the perfect reading for tomorrow at the hair salon.  Getting cut and style, plus full highlighting.  I'd gotten the hair cut and styled back in the fall of 2020. And that's been it, since February, 2020. 

Next up, the dentist and opthomologist, though that is going to take a while: appointments available are rather far into the late spring - early summer.

So many -- I dunno, what do we call all these little jobs put off for over a year, that normally we do regularly, like taking our shoes in to get heel and toe protectors, buying new underwear, etc? I used to call them errands, because one would just d them in the course of the day of getting groceries etc. But after over a year of not doing them at all, they seem more like jobs than errands.

We did some of those along with the library errand, as well as getting groceries at Morton Williams.  Came home, had lunch.  The predicted rain is expected any moment. So, just a day.  An average, normal day.  Not since 2016 has there been one of those.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

     . . . . Tomorrow night Postmambo initiates its monthly Movie Night!

As a prelude to NOLA Reconnect, we eased into it with something we call Movie Night. A low-key cyber-cinematheque, watching a relevant non-fiction movie on Vimeo together with conversation afterwards on Zoom. Movie Night turned out great. So, I'm pleased to announce, we're going to have Postmambo Movie Night on the third Thursday of every month for the rest of 2021. Which means that --

===>>> this Thursday night, April 15, at 7 p.m. Central Daylight Time (8 pm Eastern), we're going to watch

The Mali-Cuba Connection

This is a documentary, shot over a period of twenty years, about the charanga Las Maravillas de Mali, formed by a group of Malian music students in mid-60s Havana, whose best-known member, Boncana Maiga, subsequently directed the famous Africando recordings in the '90s, including the global dance hit "Yay Boy." Much of the film takes place in Bamako.
Conversing with us after the screening will be special guest Banning Eyre -- my longtime colleague at Afropop Worldwide, author of In Griot Time and general go-to Mali expert -- conversing with us after the screening. I also will share a little footage from Las Maravillas de Mali's reunion in Havana during Jazz Plaza Festival in 2019.

Reading and Listening: Black Nerdom

      . . . . In a sad way, because in this absolute white supremacist historical nation, the common denial that this subject even exists is as normal as mass gun fire massacres. But though I am anything but a nerd of any kind, much less one who is Black, I still feel a sense of personal skin in this game. 

This is due to an incident that happened at the last sf/f gathering I attended, which happened to be a reading, in the early aughts of this, the 21st Century.*  A White man, ended threatening me with rape and murder because he insisted that Black people did not and never did have anything whatsoever to to do with sf/f and its peculiar** visions of the past or the present or the future. He slammed a chair on a table when I tried to draw attention to Afro Futurism and African American musical vision in funk, jazz,  including as early with, but not limited to, Sun Ra.

 He screamed I was a liar, that I'd made-up Afro Futurism.  There was no such thing, and certainly not in Science Fiction and Fantasy.  For one thing HE had never heard of it, and he knew science fiction and fantasy inside out,  because he was now 50 and had been reading it all HIS life.

Alas, we are certainly still holding on with fang and claw to that peculiar* white version of sf/f -- and all the other related pop cultural expressions and experiences.

Long read article in the New York Times Magazine.  As the NYT is paywalled, here is the url:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/t-magazine/black-nerds-culture.html

The Black Nerds Redefining the Culture by Adam Bradley

"By pushing back against centuries-old stereotypes, a historically overlooked community is claiming space it was long denied."

The piece is a fine run-down of pop culture sf/f nerdom and Black expression.  However, this is my favorite part, which is equally essential information for White nerds who are BLM allies:

....A BRIEF HISTORY of Black nerds dates back to before the Revolutionary War, to Phillis Wheatley, the young Black woman born a slave who was the first person of African descent to publish a collection of English poetry — only to have to prove her authorship, as well as her knowledge of the works of Homer, Ovid and Virgil, to a panel of “the most respectable characters in Boston,” as the 18 white men described themselves in a note “To the Public” that introduces her “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” (1773). The Black nerd also lives in the pages of Charles W. Chesnutt, whose short-story collection “The Conjure Woman” (1899) reads like a late 19th-century iteration of Peele’s “Get Out,” where the resources of the Black imagination overcome the sunken place of white mythmaking and domination. And it lives in Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man” (1952), whose nameless Black male protagonist is a self-described “thinker-tinker” writing the story of his life from his underground lair fitted with precisely 1,369 light bulbs; even the novel’s title evokes H.G. Wells’s science fiction classic “The Invisible Man” (1897), repurposing invisibility as a metaphor for the erasure of Black identity under the racist white gaze....

 

Alas, unmentioned are two early expressions -- these would be very early even if the author was White -- of sf/f imaginings, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892) by Frances E. W. Harper, and, even prior to the War of the Rebellion and abolition, Blake; or The Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba (1859) by Martin Delany.

(Anyone who knows me or el V can see why this discovery excited us so much.  Ha!)

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

In the meantime, even though The American Slave Coast has been out of print in print for months, due to the covid-19 aggravated shortage of print and production plants, Robert Christgau was moved to give the book his current Substack space, And It Don't Stop.  He told us yesterday, when informing us it was going up, that he'd been working on this 'stack' for weeks.  It also took him years to read Slave Coast because the content is so painful to read.  But it is a permanent, large, part that is our nation's history. 

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

*  This incident had a great deal to do with my removal of self from the field.

** See the classic history by Kenneth E. Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956). The book was revelatory still at the end of the 1980's when I read it first.  It is still most worth reading, particularly if one is beginning a program of self-education into these matters, in hopes of being a better informed ally of BLM.

Louise Penny: New Bestie, New Project

     . . . . So. Big News in publishing.  No, not in this case, the merger of Penguin-Random House and Simon & Schuster.  Louise Penny’s writing a thriller with her new bestie, Hillary Clinton about a baby Secretary of State.

The only interesting thing really, reading the latest Penny, All The Devils Are Here (2020), was feeling with every sentence, on every page how separated we were from milieu and concerns from what brought us to Penny's Gamache novels in the first place: interesting, variegated individuals, in long-time relationships and community with each other, in a 'normal' sort of place, particularly Three Pines, and what happens when the abnormal disturbs the normal condition.

Here, we're not in Three Pines, or even Montreal or Quebec, or even Canada, but in Paris. We don't have a mad poet and duck, or a loving gay couple and their B&B, and all the others living in the beautiful, rather isolated rural, forested Three Rivers geography, but  the very high-powered, very wealthy, very politically connected, multi-national, legal, enforcement and financial figures and milieu.  This background, this late, on Gamache, that he's from entitled and privileged family and guardians -- had not previously penetrated into the Gamache universe composed of 15 previous novels.  That's a lot of universe to leave out this foundational platform of Gamache's character.

In this 16th Gamache novel, I didn't hear Gamache, I heard Clinton's voice, as in her What Happened, published post the 2016 election, constantly referencing her many internationally wealthy friends, their palatial estates in the DR, etc. -- without sensibility toward those outside of those rarefied circles that have forgotten, if they ever knew, what it is like to fly coach, not in presidential or billionaire luxury. What Happened is exactly what happened -- no touch with what life is for people who aren't comfortably within her circles of involvement.  It looks like Penny got star-struck.

I didn't like All the Devils Are Here, for all those reasons.  It's off-putting, possessing nothing of what brought me back, book after book, to Gamache's world.

That Penny had gone as far with that world that was possible shows strongly in the previous two – three titles, which were flattened, over-stretched, rather implausible and lacking the sort of engagement with the characters and milieu we loved in the long string of books that preceded them.  So she wanting to do something different is understandable.  But her choice to shoe horn her new interests – and her new, insider access to a wider and vastly more powerful mise en scène – into the world of Gamache, was an error of sensibility the same as Clinton’s.  It too is flat while simultaneously, not a bigger world, despite the scope, but claustrophobic, which Three Pines was not, despite being so defined.

Penny's was same mistake, the failure, that cost Clinton an election, has cost Penny (and Clinton) a reader.

One cannot help but speculate as whether or not the Clinton-Penny State of Terror "baby" protagonist, Secretary of State, fated to put the world to rights, will also, like President Clinton, and Obama's Secretary of State, HRC, will install a bottomless corrupt and brutal regime in Haiti to protect the international business interests, as well as the Clintons' own business interests.  Interesting, hmmmmmm?

If Cats Had Wings

      . . . . Owls are perhaps my favorite birds, all kinds of owls, and most particularly the plain old barn owl.  I grew up with barn owls. Pairs of them did nest and raise their young in our classic red barn.  The barn itself, full of cattle feed, was a good place to live, because the grain attracted owl's kind of food.  This was the same reason. beyond shelter from the weather, fox and neighbors' dogs, our farm yard cats lived and raised their kittens in the barn. All around the farm yard were granaries and corn cribs, the big garden, and grain fields, all attracting everything from mourning doves, gophers, rabbits, pheasants and mice. A good place to be an owl or a cat.

There's a part of me still, which wishes to adhere to my childhood conviction that owls were cats with wings.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved;

Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof

Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest

Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest,

Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I.

All of the night was quite barred out except

An owl’s cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment,

But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird’s voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars,

Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

                   ---- Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

~~~~~~~~~~~

A perfect day for a walk.  It was warm enough I went without a hat and my glasses didn't fog over from the warmth of my double-masked face.  The only drawback was the intense sun glare when walking south.  But I could put up with that, so enjoyed a long winter walk among the piles of dirty, chunky snow.  People are still digging out here.  People are dining in the streateries in large numbers.

~~~~~~~~~~

Huge plus: a dear friend facing some nasty surgery, didn't have to undergo it after all, as the problem was solved another way.  Hooray!