Despite the obstacles of him coming down sick and now me too, again, and why yes, the classic raw days of classic February NYC winter -- currently we are after noon and the temperature stands at 27º.
I'm gonna go back to bed where I shall curl up with Henry Adam's novel set in D.C., the delicious Democracy (published anonymously in 1880) until it's time to go to the theater for Chico and Rita. This is a screening that includes a Q&A with the creative and production team, and the students are going. I promised I'd go with el V, so I shall. Beside the film is so lucious, graphically and musically. If it plays in your area you really should check it out.
The more I read in Democracy, the more I think I'm reading one of Gore Vidal's Chronicles of Empire novels. There's Senator Gore, who plays a role -- an actual senator, who was one of Vidal's family. Democracy is filled with the names of contemporaries in D.C. at the time it's set as well as barely disguised other names, for this is also a roman à clef. As well, it's a comedy of manners and an exposé of contemporary D.C. corruption. The wit and observations sparkle still. I'm deeply impressed. Surely Edith Wharton read this.
I'm reading this in a Library of America volume that collects Democracy, his other novel, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, and The Education of Henry Adams. None of his historical work is collected in anything, much less the wonderful Library of America series. Keep in mind his Mont Saint Michel and Chartres are presented as belles lettres at best, in a lit course, or art history. This confirms my sense of why Henry Adams has so dropped from sight in the last decades. I must thank Gore Vidal for returning him to my consciousness as an historian.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
*Slavery By Another Name* Broadcasts Tomorrow Night On PBS
PBS has an admirably high quality schedule of Black History Month broadcasts this year.
This one surely should not be missed, the screen adaptation of Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name. It's on tomorrow night (Monday, February 13).
What is particularly wonderful is that even those of us without televisions can see these because PBS puts up a feed online after the intitial broadcast. Here's their Black History Month schedule. The first one was The Underground Railroad. Last week's program of Scandinavian footage of the Black Panthers, Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, was wonderful -- and it corrects a lot of false info that's been propagandised about the Black Pathers, who they were and what they did.
This one surely should not be missed, the screen adaptation of Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name. It's on tomorrow night (Monday, February 13).
What is particularly wonderful is that even those of us without televisions can see these because PBS puts up a feed online after the intitial broadcast. Here's their Black History Month schedule. The first one was The Underground Railroad. Last week's program of Scandinavian footage of the Black Panthers, Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, was wonderful -- and it corrects a lot of false info that's been propagandised about the Black Pathers, who they were and what they did.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Henry Adams 2
Thanks to an Elsewhere friend this ignorant person got clued in as to at least a contributing factor in the current obscurity of Henry Adams. So I did some poking around.
The first edition of The Education was a private printing by Adams, circulated among his friends many years earlier than the commercially published edition we know. This first edition contained letter exchanges with various friends, in which they batted ideas concerning Henry Adams's ideas back-and-forth. These letters are filled with anti-semitic observations. The letters are not part of the much later commerical publication of The Education, but painfully anti-semitic text remains within the memoir-contemplation of the author's past, the family's past, the nation's past and how all these pasts worked on him and the national political manueverings.
Mont San Michel and Chartres, studies in the Holy Grail of the medieval European Unity, as one then stomach-churningly must expect, contain a great deal more anti-semitic expression.
As these works are the only ones of Adams's anyone was looking at after his death in 1918, and they were taught in Literature classes, he understandably became less and less acceptable in undergraduate syllabii, particularly after the 1960's. (Not to mention, I will maintain, unreadable to anyone who isn't deeply versed by now in U.S. history -- and probably European history too, when one comes to Henry Adams's MSM and C studies.)
Page thirteen (page 19 in the journal article) in the pdf of "The Real Education of Henry Adams" by Richard A. Samuelson, one of a series of Reconsideration essays in the journal National Affairs, (Spring 2002) is very useful reading for Adams's anti-semitism. I'd quote it but this pdf version doesn't allow for c&p ... some do, this one doesn't.
Which means his historical studies of the Republican and Jacksonian eras of the nation such as his 9 volume history of Jefferson and Madison administrations have been ignored by historians for decades.
Very recently it seems, Henry Adams's work in these eras is receiving attention again. Sean Wilentz, all-round fair-haired historian, commentator on culture and politics, is one of those who has somewhat revived looking at Henry Adams again -- as in his mammoth (2005) Rise of American Democracy, and the equally fair-haired Garry Wills -- as in his (2005) Henry Adams and the Making of America. Both of these fellows are favorite historians consulted by the MSM from the NY Times to NPR. They both are favorites of the New Republic as well. Wilentz hammers Wills's scholarship in the New Republic.
Historians'biases and advocacy pov is not always easy to tease out, but teased out the bias, advocacy, point of view must be by each of us, in order to understand fully what they are telling us. How anyone can think that history is a dull, sleepy profession is hard to understand!
The first edition of The Education was a private printing by Adams, circulated among his friends many years earlier than the commercially published edition we know. This first edition contained letter exchanges with various friends, in which they batted ideas concerning Henry Adams's ideas back-and-forth. These letters are filled with anti-semitic observations. The letters are not part of the much later commerical publication of The Education, but painfully anti-semitic text remains within the memoir-contemplation of the author's past, the family's past, the nation's past and how all these pasts worked on him and the national political manueverings.
Mont San Michel and Chartres, studies in the Holy Grail of the medieval European Unity, as one then stomach-churningly must expect, contain a great deal more anti-semitic expression.
As these works are the only ones of Adams's anyone was looking at after his death in 1918, and they were taught in Literature classes, he understandably became less and less acceptable in undergraduate syllabii, particularly after the 1960's. (Not to mention, I will maintain, unreadable to anyone who isn't deeply versed by now in U.S. history -- and probably European history too, when one comes to Henry Adams's MSM and C studies.)
Page thirteen (page 19 in the journal article) in the pdf of "The Real Education of Henry Adams" by Richard A. Samuelson, one of a series of Reconsideration essays in the journal National Affairs, (Spring 2002) is very useful reading for Adams's anti-semitism. I'd quote it but this pdf version doesn't allow for c&p ... some do, this one doesn't.
Which means his historical studies of the Republican and Jacksonian eras of the nation such as his 9 volume history of Jefferson and Madison administrations have been ignored by historians for decades.
Very recently it seems, Henry Adams's work in these eras is receiving attention again. Sean Wilentz, all-round fair-haired historian, commentator on culture and politics, is one of those who has somewhat revived looking at Henry Adams again -- as in his mammoth (2005) Rise of American Democracy, and the equally fair-haired Garry Wills -- as in his (2005) Henry Adams and the Making of America. Both of these fellows are favorite historians consulted by the MSM from the NY Times to NPR. They both are favorites of the New Republic as well. Wilentz hammers Wills's scholarship in the New Republic.
Historians'
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Henry Adams
I have found another historian to add to the pantheon of Most Useful and Most Interesting.
How could I have missed Henry Adams for all this time? His great-grandfather and grandfather both presidents? His father one of the negotiators in Britain to ensure it didn't recognize the CSA. Charles Sumner constantly at the house, and one of those men the boy Adams admired and liked so much? A man who wrote a history in nine volumes of the U.S. during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison? Who wrote a long historical essay on Napoleon and San Domingue? Who lived through the Civil War into the 20th century, and lived inside D.C. for decades? Wrote novels?
That while reading him I hear the voice of Gore Vidal coming through loud and clear only helps matters. Vidal too experienced so much of the history he lived through personally knowing those in the corridors of power. One wonders even, if that narrator's voice in his historical series, Chronicles of Empire, in any way was influenced by that of Henry Adams.
Adams conducted his research from archives and primary documents in Britain and Europe too, as well as here in the U.S. Which allows him to avoid that triumphalist exceptionalism that so many of his contemporaries communicated. He thought seeing our actions through the eyes of other nations to be a very useful thing that politicians should take more into account. Imagine how acceptable that attitude was, which might explain how he got dropped from the American history curriculum.
He was never presented to us as an historian in university. He was taught, if at all, as a minor belles lettres sort, quaint and of less relevance the further his era receded into the past -- The Education of Henry Adams. I found this book unreadable. Now I know why -- I didn't know anything! All the figures he refers to, even in the first five pages, I had no idea at all who they were. This was in the American Literature department. He was part of Lit and Lit Crit, but not history curricula.
How could I have missed Henry Adams for all this time? His great-grandfather and grandfather both presidents? His father one of the negotiators in Britain to ensure it didn't recognize the CSA. Charles Sumner constantly at the house, and one of those men the boy Adams admired and liked so much? A man who wrote a history in nine volumes of the U.S. during the administrations of Jefferson and Madison? Who wrote a long historical essay on Napoleon and San Domingue? Who lived through the Civil War into the 20th century, and lived inside D.C. for decades? Wrote novels?
That while reading him I hear the voice of Gore Vidal coming through loud and clear only helps matters. Vidal too experienced so much of the history he lived through personally knowing those in the corridors of power. One wonders even, if that narrator's voice in his historical series, Chronicles of Empire, in any way was influenced by that of Henry Adams.
Adams conducted his research from archives and primary documents in Britain and Europe too, as well as here in the U.S. Which allows him to avoid that triumphalist exceptionalism that so many of his contemporaries communicated. He thought seeing our actions through the eyes of other nations to be a very useful thing that politicians should take more into account. Imagine how acceptable that attitude was, which might explain how he got dropped from the American history curriculum.
He was never presented to us as an historian in university. He was taught, if at all, as a minor belles lettres sort, quaint and of less relevance the further his era receded into the past -- The Education of Henry Adams. I found this book unreadable. Now I know why -- I didn't know anything! All the figures he refers to, even in the first five pages, I had no idea at all who they were. This was in the American Literature department. He was part of Lit and Lit Crit, but not history curricula.
Monday, February 6, 2012
Labor, Class, Racism Struggle & Ideology
As well as the useful, thought-provoking How the Irish Became White, there are two other really fine studies that were published in the same period, which should be read, as content and slants of all three books illuminate and cite each other.
Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1990 - reprinted in 1996:
and
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David R. Roediger (1991). Originally it came out from Verson, like Saxton's, but Verso has made a pdf available at no cost online. This one includes an Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver.
Among what I personally am finding so useful for my own research and what I'm writing right now is that each work includes good sections on the Jacksonian era. Unlike The American Slave Coast though, these books are focused on the years after Reconstruction and the making of the labor struggle to organize for better working conditions as we've generally understood it into and through the 20th century.
Additionally, these are historians who reject entirely the Psychohistory view of history -- which is such a relief, particularily when working with issues such as the construction of "race." I hadn't even consciously realized how much I rejected Psychohistory until listening (as oppose to re-reading) Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror and the way she built out huge portions of that book from a psychological diagnois of 14th century Europeans -- that these mothers and parents didn't love their infants and small children because they died so frequently, and based it the lack of art that showed such parental love except with the Virgin and Jesus -- and yikes! there wasn't secular art to speak of yet in the 14th century! particularly at the start of it!
Each of these works are now classics in the relationship in our nation among racism, class and labor. So why aren't these works and the many other useful studies that appeared in the 90's that focus on this cluster of issues by black and white authors not cited by those who insist that it is class that matters only these days, not racism? For these books make it very clear that the truth of the matter is quite otherwise.
There is enormous room for more work too, particularly now as the jobs that have so long been the springboard into the middle class for the working poor and labor, along with the artisan skills, have shrunk to nearly zero. How is this going to play out in the coming years in this cluster of intimately entwined categories?
The more I look into everything around slavery and racism in our national history the more I see how little things change, really. Which, as the author of The Wages of Whiteness says can create a sense of pessimism, at least in the readers and critics. What we see are the patterns of our own national folkways. But I'm wondering if we really aren't approaching the time when this will change. Because, folks, when it comes to those jobs and the future, there isn't even a social caste-status payoff for whiteness in the mix any longer.
Culturally, at least the musicians recognized this (well, not Charlie Daniels and his ilks, of course -- but then we're speaking of the really good stuff that you need a great deal of talent to play, compose, arrange, or jam on). All three of these books have sections on culture, particularly music.
Alexander Saxton's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (1990 - reprinted in 1996:
and
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class by David R. Roediger (1991). Originally it came out from Verson, like Saxton's, but Verso has made a pdf available at no cost online. This one includes an Introduction by Kathleen Cleaver.
Among what I personally am finding so useful for my own research and what I'm writing right now is that each work includes good sections on the Jacksonian era. Unlike The American Slave Coast though, these books are focused on the years after Reconstruction and the making of the labor struggle to organize for better working conditions as we've generally understood it into and through the 20th century.
Additionally, these are historians who reject entirely the Psychohistory view of history -- which is such a relief, particularily when working with issues such as the construction of "race." I hadn't even consciously realized how much I rejected Psychohistory until listening (as oppose to re-reading) Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror and the way she built out huge portions of that book from a psychological diagnois of 14th century Europeans -- that these mothers and parents didn't love their infants and small children because they died so frequently, and based it the lack of art that showed such parental love except with the Virgin and Jesus -- and yikes! there wasn't secular art to speak of yet in the 14th century! particularly at the start of it!
Each of these works are now classics in the relationship in our nation among racism, class and labor. So why aren't these works and the many other useful studies that appeared in the 90's that focus on this cluster of issues by black and white authors not cited by those who insist that it is class that matters only these days, not racism? For these books make it very clear that the truth of the matter is quite otherwise.
There is enormous room for more work too, particularly now as the jobs that have so long been the springboard into the middle class for the working poor and labor, along with the artisan skills, have shrunk to nearly zero. How is this going to play out in the coming years in this cluster of intimately entwined categories?
The more I look into everything around slavery and racism in our national history the more I see how little things change, really. Which, as the author of The Wages of Whiteness says can create a sense of pessimism, at least in the readers and critics. What we see are the patterns of our own national folkways. But I'm wondering if we really aren't approaching the time when this will change. Because, folks, when it comes to those jobs and the future, there isn't even a social caste-status payoff for whiteness in the mix any longer.
Culturally, at least the musicians recognized this (well, not Charlie Daniels and his ilks, of course -- but then we're speaking of the really good stuff that you need a great deal of talent to play, compose, arrange, or jam on). All three of these books have sections on culture, particularly music.
Friday, February 3, 2012
*A History of the World In 100 Museum Objects*
I love this BBC radio program made in concert a couple of years ago with the British Museum. When I can't be home to hear it, I can click online for the program. This is one of those series which really is best imbibed in the small program time doses.
It's being broadcast here at 1 PM. We've just finished today's installment, # 19, the Mold Gold Cape, discovered in the 19th century, in a hill, in North Wales.
There is a Numen, it has always seemed to me, contained in ancient objects that somehow have spun successfully down the spiral of millennia to be handled, thought of, dreamed over, the closest to the key that could allow us to travel back up the millennia spirals, to unlock the past. Each one of these objects is treasure that has become history, as the commentary intones.
It's being broadcast here at 1 PM. We've just finished today's installment, # 19, the Mold Gold Cape, discovered in the 19th century, in a hill, in North Wales.
There is a Numen, it has always seemed to me, contained in ancient objects that somehow have spun successfully down the spiral of millennia to be handled, thought of, dreamed over, the closest to the key that could allow us to travel back up the millennia spirals, to unlock the past. Each one of these objects is treasure that has become history, as the commentary intones.
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
*Apocalypse to Go* by Katharine Kerr
The Science Fiction and Fantasy publisher DAW has been publishing quite a few of the best writers with which the field currently is blessed, including, but not limited to, this year's World Fantasy Award winner, Nnedi Okorafor, Tanya Huff and Patrick Rothfuss. Katharine Kerr, creator of the great Deverry Fantasy series, is another DAW writer giving us consistently highly entertaining, smart and very well written books.
Katharine Kerr's latest series, the Nola O'Grady Novels, are, in order of publication -- License to Enscorcell, Water to Burn, and the most recent, published 02/07/12, Apocalypse to Go. The series is urban fantasy, located in an alternate San Francisco. Among these novels' strengths is the strong sense of real place, despite it being an alternate San Francisco, situated in a universe different from ours in many respects. This palpable sense of reality helps the reader to effortlessly suspend disbelief and submerge in the story.
One of the urban fantasy conventions is the protagonist generally is paired with another equal but different companion. This would be Israeli Interpol agent Ari Nathan, Irish Nola's partner in the super-secret supernatural government agency that is secret even from the (many) other government secret agencies. The conflict of potential divided loyalties is equal to the conflict at times as to who is giving orders, who is in charge and who makes the decisions. This makes for an interesting relationship, which becomes even more interesting as Nola's close-knit, if difficult, Irish family becomes a part of the mix of diverse worlds, supernatural creatures, murders, kidnappings and missions to save the world.
While Kerr's Nola O'Grady novels do conform to the conventions of urban fantasy, she puts a stamp of originality on each of them. The originality partly rises out of her fine grasp of how novels are plotted and structured, and partly through Kerr's splendid command of language. You hear it in the way the characters talk to us the readers, talk to and about each other. The interchanges and observations are conventionally genre 'smart,' yet on Kerr's pages they come through as naturally hip, not self-consciously wise-cracking attempts to talk the supernatural noir talk. But then the author lives in the state where noir and its language on the page and on the screen were invented to large degree.
Because of the unexpected actions of Nola's family, and also because the language in this world of Kerr's balances tension and lightness, this reader has often been put in mind of the first and best novels of Roger Zelazny's wonderful Amber series. I vividly recall reading non-stop Nine Princes in Amber the first time, hardly able to stop and take a breath. This is high praise. Go Kerr!
Katharine Kerr's latest series, the Nola O'Grady Novels, are, in order of publication -- License to Enscorcell, Water to Burn, and the most recent, published 02/07/12, Apocalypse to Go. The series is urban fantasy, located in an alternate San Francisco. Among these novels' strengths is the strong sense of real place, despite it being an alternate San Francisco, situated in a universe different from ours in many respects. This palpable sense of reality helps the reader to effortlessly suspend disbelief and submerge in the story.
One of the urban fantasy conventions is the protagonist generally is paired with another equal but different companion. This would be Israeli Interpol agent Ari Nathan, Irish Nola's partner in the super-secret supernatural government agency that is secret even from the (many) other government secret agencies. The conflict of potential divided loyalties is equal to the conflict at times as to who is giving orders, who is in charge and who makes the decisions. This makes for an interesting relationship, which becomes even more interesting as Nola's close-knit, if difficult, Irish family becomes a part of the mix of diverse worlds, supernatural creatures, murders, kidnappings and missions to save the world.
While Kerr's Nola O'Grady novels do conform to the conventions of urban fantasy, she puts a stamp of originality on each of them. The originality partly rises out of her fine grasp of how novels are plotted and structured, and partly through Kerr's splendid command of language. You hear it in the way the characters talk to us the readers, talk to and about each other. The interchanges and observations are conventionally genre 'smart,' yet on Kerr's pages they come through as naturally hip, not self-consciously wise-cracking attempts to talk the supernatural noir talk. But then the author lives in the state where noir and its language on the page and on the screen were invented to large degree.
Because of the unexpected actions of Nola's family, and also because the language in this world of Kerr's balances tension and lightness, this reader has often been put in mind of the first and best novels of Roger Zelazny's wonderful Amber series. I vividly recall reading non-stop Nine Princes in Amber the first time, hardly able to stop and take a breath. This is high praise. Go Kerr!
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