Riposte From the Past; Repost From Elsewhere

     . . . . Performed often at CBGB's in the 1980's, when you all didn't know me.

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

WHEN THE PLAGUE HITS THE CITYV
Ned Sublette / Constance Ash (c) 1982

When the plague hits the city and the rats take a holiday
There's an underground culture growing down in the subway
When the plague hits your body the fire burns all night long
When the plague hits the city the survivors are spectacularly strong

When the plague hits the city loved ones die on the spot
When the plague hits the city doctors are taken out and shot
When the plague hits the city we fuck with our DNA
When the plague hits the city and the rats take a holiday
But:
Everybody's disaster is somebody's good luck
Everybody's disaster is somebody's good luck

When the plague hits the city money changes hands
Funny things happen to the laws of supply and demand
The rich leave town or seal themselves away (hey hey)
When the plague hits the city and the rats take a holiday

When the plague hits the city some will do very well
There will be class mobility if you have something to sell
And when the plague hits the city the musicians who are still alive
Will have lot of work entertaining those who survive
I read in the paper that:

Everybody's disaster is somebody's good luck
Everybody's disaster is somebody's good luck
And the TV says:

How good for us the plague will be
How good for us the plague will be
How good for us the plague will be

To the people who are Failures of Fools, who let this happen, and now refuse to do a damned thing to try and stop it, and those of you who insist they will not isolate because this is fake news, may the horrors of hell come to you and never leave.

Friday the 13th: Downtown Manhattan Snapshot

     . . . . A relaxed, youngish woman, back against the Greek Bakery's window, knees up, feet perched upon the bench in front the one on which she's comfortably seated, coffee at her side, wearing a breathing mask, reading The New Yorker, enjoying this warm, sunny day.

I wanted to take her photo but that would have invaded her privacy.  Asking permission would have broken the picture.

~~~~~~~~~

     . . . . Growing up as a farm girl, raised in a community for whom memories of the Great Depression plus the annual reality of winter were their organizing forces, my last four weeks primarily have focused on preparation for breaks in the supply chain, isolation, quarantine, being sick at home.  This began even before Postmambo realized that ya, the For The Funk Of It tour in NOLA was going to have to be, at the least, postponed.

Watching the news from China and Italy made it clear covid-19 would arrive here, was probably already here, but we had no idea when the 'leadership' would even bother to take notice.

Fortunately our state and city were noticing and attempting to take action even by the start of the new year.  9/11 and Hurricane Sandy taught us all something. But in Washington?  We all knew they'd do nothing, blame it on others, and when they had to do something, they'd make it worse. And even worse than that, even if forced to, they wouldn't know what to do or how to do it, and then they'd lie some more.  So ....

The first supplies I bought were over the counter remedies such as Nyquil, aspirin, Riccola Drops, tissues, toilet paper, paper towels, dish detergent, chlorine bleach, lysol and chlorine hand wipes, mouthwash, toothpaste (some of which I had already, since I try to stay ahead on these items).  But even by then, due to the flu season being so bad here this year, there was no hand sanitizer.  Then came the rice, couscous, pasta, lentils, beans, tea and so on -- which again I always have on hand anyway, but never in a quantity that could hopefully get us through 3 weeks to 2 months (if it goes beyond 2 -3 months -- well! who knows?). 

We have a lot of coffee beans -- like we have a lot of rum -- because of Cuba --people there are always giving us gifts of coffee and rum. We also had a couple of packages of unopened sanitary gloves, and the masks, which are useless for anything but mild home cleaning up plaster and other repairs or accidents.

Over the following days, my usual daily shopping included something extra for storage every day, beyond the necessary for making dinner, having breakfast, doing laundry, cleaning.

We made new wills and had them notarized.

Now that the mass prep buying is in effect, we could concentrate on the more perishable, but still with a good shelf life, foods like yams, potatoes, butternut, acorn and spaghetti squashes to use now.  I am making spinach soup today, for instance.

Some I'll freeze, some I'll give out right now to two male friends and neighbors who have no idea of what to do, some I'll give to some of the people in my building who haven't had either the good fortune and privilege to do anything like this, and at this moment, can't do anything either, because all these things are missing from the shelves now.  They all have freezers, so this is going to be what I'm doing. Making soups and legume dishes for friends and neighbors. Nobody's doining a run on fresh baby spinach, packages of carrots, yams and potatoes! At least at the moment.

Other snapshots from Thursday (a particularly black day, particularly in NYC, due to the markets) and yesterday: elderly gentlemen, depressed and defeated, staring hopelessly at the fairly depleted shelves in our wonderful local Morton Williams supermarket, having not a clue as to what they should be doing.  One reached out finally, and dropped two rolls of toilet paper in his basket.  My heart broke.  These are men -- like some of our friends, who live alone, have never done meal planning or preparation in their lives, who now that they're alone eat in little restaurants or fast food, or -- I don't know. Heartbreaking that we care so little for all of us sharing our communities

Then there are these gougers, weeping for their lost investments as state and other regs against gouging kick in. For them, we shall not squeeze a tear (though, perhaps? squeezing the trigger would indeed be appropriate?:

Now, while millions of people across the country search in vain for hand sanitizer to protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus, Mr. Colvin is sitting on 17,700 bottles of the stuff with little idea where to sell them.

“It’s been a huge amount of whiplash,” he said. “From being in a situation where what I’ve got coming and going could potentially put my family in a really good place financially to ‘What the heck am I going to do with all of this?"

They don't know what to do with these supplies, even as local hospitals and other medical facilities are without masks, sanitizer and these other essential supplies.

In Cuba, the men in the Morton Williams supermarket wouldn't be left alone and neglected to try and figure out what to do without the experience or means to do so. In Cuba hoarding would not be tolerated by either government or community.

In fact, now that two Italians  have brought the virus there, Cuba's mobilizing for it:

Nevertheless I am again, so privileged because I live where I do.

Number 1) I am not facing this alone.

Number 2) The population is generally young and prosperous, i.e. healthy. 

Number 3)  City and state have a certain amount of preparedness for emergencies -- we've all been through 9/11 and Hurricane Sandy, for starters, seen what was not done at all, before or after, in the aftermath of Katrina and more lately, Maria and Puerto Rico. So we have a lot of people in government and privately, who have already been thinking on these lines. But like everywhere else, our public health systems have been shut down, reduced, over and over and over, due to the thugs in D.C. cutting budgets, and destroying anything that could help the enormous population of homeless, mentally and physically challenged.

But here the churches are mobilizing -- not for services, but for watching out for each other, looking in on elderly neighbors, providing them with food.

Even our own landlords have been proactive, hiring already two weeks ago extra help to regularly disinfect and deep clean the public spaces such as laundry room, central staircase and railings, floors and doors, mail and delivery spaces. They sent email update with pertinent phone numbers to each tenant outlining what to do if one feels in need of help. One of  the young men in our building volunteered to shop for the two elderly tenants who have compromised immune systems due to cancer -- thankfully, they are both in remission. 

Here, learning distance teaching is in effect. NYU is in spring break so there's time to learn to use Zoom, hopefully (a real pita, but hey). We are working out protocols to live together 24/7 in this tiny space in harmony, including taking long walks separately.  And fortunately, having self taught video-audio tools, there is the Cuban music documentary to work on.

As I begin and end: even though I have the 9/11 dry rasping cough that afflicts so many down here, and there are allergies, and have a bad back, am in some ways in the high risk category -- still I am truly privileged, unlike way too many others.

A Bottled in Bond Valentine

     . . . . As this is Valentine's Day, it seems appropriate to acknowledge movie Bond's consistent love for one person, which we first see creeping toward the center of the Bond narrative with the 90's Pierce Brosnan Bond character reboot.

For various reasons related to ongoing delves into our entertainments as primary shapers of mythologies, national, personal, political and cultural, I've been doing a deep dive into the post-Connery filmic James Bond reboots of the 1990's and 2000's. These interest me because these were the transition decades when all aspects of our lives became entirely dominated by global media's reach. 

This was the period every institution from newspapers and financial industries, to political operions and even movies themselves, began to understand everything either had already changed or was in the irrevocable process of doing so. They also realized these changes gave advantage more easily to benefit themselves at the cost of the rest of us.  Bond too, then was bound to change, as was his service.

By the way, this is the first watch of every one of the Brosnan and Craig Bonds for me, with the exception of Craig's first, Casino Royal (2006), and third, Skyfall (2012).

Despite the hideous business made by the writers between Bond and the masturbation fantasies of Moneypenny for the Brosnan Bond, these are the films in which we see the relationship between M and Bond slipping into the foreground. At the start of Brosnan Bond, Goldeneye (1995) M's unflinching hardass teaches Bond the hard lessons about personal relationships he must learn in order to serve their beloved England.

Bond says, "I don't trust anyone."
M responds, "Now you're learning."

By the time we get to the 2000’s Daniel Craig reboot, and the final Dench M, in Skyfall, (2012), it is their relationship that matters most to both of them. Nor have they anyone else. Everyone they've come up with, worked with, along with the changed world has retired, or died, including M's beloved husband. It's the formula that increasingly embitters these two Bonds that everyone Bond has ever loved, or even not even bothered to pretend to love, has died too. Our Q, provider of ever more powerful magic amulets with which the Brosnan Bonds are still supplied, has kept the persona, but has been incarnated already by a series of new, and younger Q's as one after another has succumbed to the end. 

M won't tell Brosnan Bond that he's her very best, she does tell others. M betrays Bond more than once in the Brosnan and the Craig Bonds. By the end of the Brosans, Die Another Day (2002), Bond is conflicted about how she treats him and certainly by the value of what the service supposedly is for. 

Craig’s Bond, in contrast, though he flouts her orders and often expresses disgust for what she does and he does, resigns and deserts, at bottom, perceives her behaviors as doing her job, and doing it right, i,e, through being the most hardassed loyal of loyal.  He shares her values like no one else does. Her decisions are always, she says, in the best service of  England, queen and the service's purpose.

This is the antithesis of Big Bad, Silva, a rejected agent from back in the days of her Hong Kong posting, thus Skyfall's plot driver, Silva's quest to personally kill M. One agent turned pathological due to her treatment. The other is willing to lay his own life down to save M.

 Silva tells Bond that once he'd been M's favorite. M herself says in Dench's M's typical harsh needling of Bond, "[Silva]was the best I ever had, better than you. Until he went off campus, making his own deals with our enemies." Craig doesn't protest.  He's aging, his ability to be the sure shot that provides the first skill for 007 rank, is gone -- like the empire and the post WWII world of intelligence agents in the field, which is the world of which both he and M were the premiere artists.

This is love between the truest of true professionals, which begins as mentor and mentee. M and Bond's relationship IS the loyalty to the ideal of empire, the lost UK dominance in the world and even in intelligence services.

However, M per se persists, resurrects in a new M, as presumably the message is that so will the UK as and Empire resurrect. Her ceramic desk accessory, the china John Bull Dog, that Craig's Bond derides, survived the bombing of MI6 headquarters and her office. In her will, she left it to Bond.

Early in the first half of Skyhall, when Silva asks Bond what he does for a living, Craig's Bond says, "Resurrection."

Skyfall was 2012. White nationalist digital corporate demagoguery hadn’t quite yet taken dominance with the assistance of all the media platforms in their headlong charge to kill democracy and the dominance of the “west.”

Next up, Spectre (2015).

And after that comes No Time To Die (March 31, 2020) perhaps the final Craig Bond, here in the first year of the second  decade of the 21st century. Wonder if what we were already hearing about in the Brosnan Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), in which, prophetically, the Big Bad was a media mogul (Jonathan Pryce!), playing for manipulating elections across the globe, has a part in the plot.

History Entertains Us!

     .... Last night I read the first few pages of Robert Harris's future medieval dystopian Britain mystery novel, The Second Sleep (2019).

Harris precedes the narrative with a pull quote from Thomas Hardy's 1886 novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is a descriptive passage of meditation upon the excavated skeleton of someone who belonged to much earlier time.

"They had lived so long ago, their time was so unlike the present, their hopes and motives were so widely removed from ours, that between them and the living there seemed to stretch a gulf too wide even for a spirit to pass."  

1886, three years before the state I was born in became a state. So we are aware how deep into our consciousness of time, of what is past, present and future Harris is going to take us.

Harris, writing in the present, looks to the past, which looks even further past, then writes a novel of the future, which is like the past. I admit I am smitten by this.

Then, even better, but proceeding purrfectly from the Hardy quotation, his opening passages could come directly from a Hardy or George Eliot -- or even Daphne du Maurier, who like Harris here, evokes the past through describing a chronologically labeled landscape excavated by the author, matched by language, pace and rhythm. Here is the first sentence of Harris's The Second Sleep:

"Late on the afternoon of Tuesday the ninth of April in the Year of Our Risen Lord 1468, a solitary traveller was to be observed picking his way on horseback across the wild moorland of that ancient region of southwestern England known since Saxon times as Wessex...."

It's elegant, pitch perfect to Harris's subject and place within the time evoked out of the reader's present -- a reader, who, if the world is fortunate, may transmute into a reader of the future -- through one time after another, beginning with Hardy, like nested Russian tea dollsm then turning around again into the present with the reader. No longer just smitten, I'm in love.  It's been a long time since a novel's opening has done this to me.

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     . . . . I recently re-watched Ridley Scott's The Gladiator, so hungry do I get for scenic historical epics.  It would be appreciated if there would be at least one of these once a year in the theaters to look forward to.  (Though more often than not, one will likely be disappointed.)

What I really appreciated even at the time of Gladiator's original release (2000) was how the cinematography showed us how much land Celtiberia had that seemed created in mind of the Goddess for raising some of the very best horses in her world.

I also simultaneously had a fair amount of trouble believing the coincidence that Crowe-Maximus arrived at his Spanish horse breeding latifundia, just after his family was massacred, starting from a point nearly 2000 miles away.  I don't have trouble believing he could have ridden that far within what seems about 3 weeks, because historically Roman soldiers and messengers could travel very long distances, even over inhospital ground -- an on little food when called to.  In this case accomplishing such a travel feat would demand the wherewithall to constantly replace Maximus's horse.  We see no evidence that Maximus is carrying a cache of cash into the battle. He presumably isn't going the direct routes, and finding horses between Germania and Spain as often has he would need to change mounts would be iffy.  I always bump into this.

Also dogs were used by a Roman army.  I haven't run across references to this use but then I'm no scholar of Roman military history beyond quite broad strokes, unlike my much more comprehensive understanding of how slavery operated within the Roman Empire. 

However, I recalled the Gladiator  dogs when re-watching the really unfairly slagged and dumped Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (2016 -- available to stream on amazon prime), because there are some truly terrifying dogs used by some of the villains in this series. The Shieldlands are the buffer zone between the ever shrinking terrain of the "Mudborn" and "The Old Lands', what looks like the remains of what had been a Roman Empire -- with various objects, styles, patterns and visitors received from there. Which is how it worked for sure as we see from excavations in Nordic and Germanic lands.

Sample of the mise en scene of Beowulf: Return to the Shieldlands (2016)

BTW, for those who are fond of these not strictly historically correct productions -- anyway, Beowulf is a fiction, as, say, Roland is not -- I was better than reasonably entertained.  A mixture by Brit sensibility of the American frontier western and Dark Age Sword and Sorcery that doesn't take itself overtly seriously, it's at least as much fun, with more interesting characters and monsters than The Witcher.  Another plus is Shieldland's  mise en scene ....

What I Saw This Weekend

     . . . . I am again a partnered person.

Vaquero returned, his Jet Blue flight took off just 20 minutes ahead of the Jamaican-Cuban-Miami earthquake. We made a date, then, for Friday night, to celebrate reunion. We both were enthusiastically looking forward to viewing two exhibits that had just concurrently opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

. . . The Arte del mar: Artistic Exchange in the Caribbean exhibit was one of those, immediately upon entering the exhibit space, the area right behind one's eyebrows enlarges, engorges with a sense of wonder, surprise, and expectation.

So many of the figures in this exhibit presented to our, NYC 2020, eyes as prominently hermaphroditic -- whether that was intentional was unknown to us, however.

The Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara exhibit was also spectacular, but we're fairly familiar with these sorts of objects and the history -- not to mention the music.  Also, for me the relationship and history of the horse within these cultures, is an element I've been looking at for decades.

Whereas, in the Caribbean Exchange, the surviving artifacts are few and, apart from Carib and Taino, peoples we've never heard of before. Some of these may well have disappeared even prior to the Colombian Exchange's diseases, enslavement and genocides.  These items presented as mysterious and strange in a way the Malian, Dogan, Niger, Fulani, etc. cultures of the Sahell and West Africa are not.  Due to the literacy of Islam, these are 'historic' cultures. Whereas the items from the Caribbean Exchange cultures are forever unknown to literate history.

     . . . . Yesterday afternoon’s errands took me around my neighborhood, east and west. Approaching to the place on Bleecker Street where I've been buying our loose tea and coffee, since the branch on my block got rent priced out, I passed one of those tourist souvenir-smoke shops. Just there, a man burst out the shop door, throwing the stand of NYC post cards across the threshold. At first I thought it was an accident, and an asshole who didn't have the social grace to even say he was sorry, to the counter person who was at the other side of the door.  Then I saw the man's  face and the rest of his body. This was someone who was violently out of control, lashing out.  He yelled, “He threatened me! he said he was going to attack me!" he screamed into the faces of the rest of we pedestrians there, our faces and body language registering censure of what he'd done.  He raced down the block, where he met up two others like him, in appearance. If they weren’t exactly homeless, they lived rough lives focused on over consumption of booze and drugs. The took protective formation and ran back to the store, while the first guy continued to shout, “He said he was going to attack me, dirty m-word.”  I didn’t believe him the first time I heard him yell the store person threatened him.  Now I certainly didn’t.  I don’t known how it turned out, for all was quiet ten minutes later. The revolving post card stand was upright in its place, where I've seen it standing, for years and years of walking this block.

Yesterday had been very pleasant. I enjoyed having so many errands to do in the overcast, damp, a little foggy weather.  It felt like April, not February 1. I was shopping again, for food and supplies for two, not just myself, i.e. I was savoring having Vaquero home again.

Then, that.  I chatted with a few others who had witnessed this event.  We began to realize this white guy who caused this ruckus, that not only I reacted so negatively toward, had been trying to get the street on his side, to attack someone, by using a racial slur.  That was depressing as hell, that he thought he could do that.  OTOH, nobody on the street responded the way he wanted.  He only had his two (white) boys at his back.  Nobody else joined in. 

Gerwig’s Little Women Part 2 -- Looking for Alcott

Warning! Spoilers Here Abound!

Louisa May Alcott’s Jo March Isn’t a Good Enough Jo March,  So Gerwig Turns Little Women Into Herself and Additional Thoughts

     . . . . The first Little Women novel concludes with Father March coming home from the hospital in D.C., Beth recovering from Scarlet Fever, Jo and Laurie, best friends, nodding at each other's reflections in the hall way mirror. And again, as at the beginning, it is Christmas. 

This is the novel that sold so well, another volume was demanded, in which everybody got married. But in the film both novels become Jo's first book, her first published novel. Though Gerwig Jo doesn't, Alcott's second half of Little Women, has Jo publishing a messy, unsuccessful novel. 

Nor is this Gerwig Jo March's Little Women publishing experience Louisa May Alcott's. Alcott was invited to do a book of interest to the young women's market after she'd become lauded as a writer to watch. This happened while an account of her Civil War nursing in Washington D.C. was published serially as Hospital Sketches, in the abolitionist magazine Boston Commonwealth. Edited by family friend, Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, advised Alcott  to edit and to slightly fictionalize her experiences, nursing wounded soldiers, union and confederate, in a D.C. hospital. She was advised to change  people's names,  create vividly detailed "sketches" rather than a tightly structured thematic whole. she clearly was a master composer within this reader-pleasing formula.

This is the formula for all her many best sellers, from the first volume of Little Women, to Little Men and Jo's Boys,  to An Old-Fashioned Girl -- which was two parts / volumes too, like Little Women -- Eight Cousins, Rose In Bloom, Under the Lilacs, and many others that aren't so well known. 

These are real novels written by a real writer, not imagined meta novels within Little Women. Changing this is as pernicious as another screen adaptation in which Beth doesn’t die. 

~ ~ ~

     . . . . Next to consider is that the readers couldn’t have had Little Men without Professor Bhaer.  He is a very particular character who can make this very particular marriage -- and he isn't a character in the first volume of Little Women.  Film Bhaer is entirely a creation of Gerwig, not Alcott's. Film Bhaer has no place in the second Little Women volume or in the subsequent March Family Chronicles, or in Alcott's life -- or perhaps there is a version?* 

Gerwig ends the film with a sexy, young, handsome Professor Bhaer viewed through a gauzed lens. Gerwig professes this marriage of Jo and Bhaer is fictional, inserted into the fiction of a fictional novel that Little Women’s fictional author, Gerwig's Jo March, writes, that we are to take as the actual Little Women novel written by real world novelist of the post War of the Rebellion era author, Louisa May Alcott.

In order to do this, not only does Gerwig change Bhaer's appearance and age, she omits to include the two young nephews whom he is supporting, caring for, and educating. Emil and Franz play with the daughters of the boarding house proprietor, Mrs. Kirke; the girls are the reason Jo is at Mrs. Kirke's and in New York City.  She's been hired to teach and care for the little girls. It's a job, one that pays a little, isn't onerous -- unlike the variety of jobs real Louisa May Alcott and her mother had to do. Mrs. Kirke's friendship with Jo's mother means Jo is further well-treated, including time off and time to write.

However, Gerwig has Her Jo do what a woman like Gerwig can do, go on a young, privileged woman's after college walk-about to NYC, to find herself, and become a pro. And thus there the film begins, in NYC, with Jo leading a bohemian life-style of the later 20th century privileged white girl who has a prosperous family to go back to when / if things sour. This is not Jo's entitlement, or even Alcott's. It leaves out what Alcott's Daily Volcano's editor says Alcott's Little Women, Vol. 2, about Alcott's writer Jo -- "Poor but proud.  She'll do." Meaning, she can depended to deliver the required column inches on time and for little cost.

The chapter titled, "Jo's Journal" describes Jo's and Professor's growing friendship and respect within the context of the boarding house and through the children. The first time Jo notices Bhaer, he takes a coal scuttle from a little scullery girl to carry up the stairs himself. "It goes better so. The little back is too young to haf such heaviness." She is so impressed by this she describes him and the scene to her family via the letter-journal.

She and Professor see each other frequently, informally, within a domestic context, his and hers. The house's little scullery girl, at the bottom of the social - financial scale, far below either poor Professor Bhaer or poor governess-minder Jo. Over the winter Jo learns as well as kind, the Professor is intelligent, much liked and respected for his learning with academic and intellectual circles. This is the sort of man that a woman like Jo, with her upbringing, would see worth living with, not a rather glamorous, but slightly weak, slightly  flibbertigibbet, Laurie, right?

So -- within the novel Jo very much wants to marry the kind, learned, cuddly, older, stout, perpetually rumpled German professor. A writer from and of the multi-chambered heart, Alcott’s much too wise a writer to create a fake relationship for her characters, whether or not she may have preferred to write a novel about boys or women who poison their rivals.

Examine this within the context of the following two March novels, Little Men and Jo’s Boys. In Alcott’s March family universe, Jo does write a novel that is described as a few sketches of Jo and her sisters growing up, and made her, as Alcott describes it, "accidentally" rich and famous. Notice, this book is written years after Jo and Bhaer marry, not written by a far too attractive, bursting with energy, young Jo March. It is a book written by a woman who has experienced all that Jo March has experienced of pain, loss, insecurity and illness, as well as fun, joy and great affections and love. 

The information about this fictional book of Mrs. Jo, as she is called, comes in "Jo's Last Scrape " Chapter Three of Jo's Boys." Here the narrator describes for "insatiable" readers, what a day of a famous, lionized writer is like.

This best seller was written during a period of financial desperation for the Bhaers and Plumfield. While the causes of this financial crisis aren't sketched, one is given the sense it had to do with a loss of pupils to keep Plumfield (which now is a thriving, co-educational college) -- just as Bronson Alcott's school had to close due to loss of pupils for including a free child of color in his classes. Alcott significantly writes that Laurie and Amy would have helped them, but were in Europe, didn't know about the plight of the school, and were not informed. It is also implied that the start of funding to turn Plumfield into a college, with buildings and a student body far grander than the small boy's school of Little Men comes from that best seller, and Jo's subsequent best selling writing and famous name -- plus, of course, backing, presumably by the Lawrence and March names and others -- Jo's father too has become a rather renowned figure, lecturing on philosophy.

Best of all, this upholds that great American foundation of all faith: If we keep persevering and working hard and are good we will succeed! We don't believe Alcott believed that either, but saying so made her rich indeed. It leaves out what Alcott's Daily Volcano's editor says about Alcott's writer Jo in Alcott’s Little Women vol 2 -- "Poor but proud.  She'll do." Meaning, she can depended to deliver the required column inches on time and for little cost.

It's in this chapter we can see Gerwig's Jo March / Bhaer / Mrs. Jo, just as we see Gerwig's Jo in Alcott learning her formula from Hospital Sketches.

Additionally consider, with Jo's own children much older than they are in the halcyon Plumfield days described in Little Men, and no 'little men pupils' to care for, further, due to illness, Jo must spend her recuperation -- doctor's orders -- resting, in a room by herself. Jo has the time and space to write again!

This is the story of so many women who wish to write or pursue an interest that isn't just a paycheck and / or with families whom they very much want and love, who even have written and been published. But the need to support oneself and one's family, and care for that family leaves no time and no space to write. If Virginia Woolf, who wrote A Room Of Her Own, had read the March Chronicles, she'd immediately recognize how significant it is to this book.  In fact, the point of this chapter in Jo's Boys is how everyone thinks a writer can always be interrupted, everyone, from family members to perfect strangers, who, often, because they're fans, believe they have the right to do so.  Deadline approaches and fans are interfering with making money! Writing has become a paycheck too!

As well the narrator of Jo's Boys could be presumed as speaking as herself, Louisa May Alcott, the writer of The March Chronicles, at the conclusion of "Positively the Last Appearance," the final chapter of the final March novels. The narrator heartily wishes that a catastrophe would be allowed. Here follows the final paragraph of "Positively The Last Appearance" --

It is a strong temptation to the weary historian to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf Plumfield and its environs so deeply in the bowels of the earth that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it. But as that somewhat melodramatic conclusion might shock my gentle readers, I will refrain**, and forestall the usual question, 'How did they end?' by briefly stating that all the marriages turned out well. The boys prospered in their various callings; so did the girls, for Bess and Josie won honours in their artistic careers, and in the course of time found worthy mates. Nan remained a busy, cheerful, independent spinster, and dedicated her life to her suffering sisters and their children, in which true woman's work she found abiding happiness. Dan never married, but lived, bravely and usefully, among his chosen people till he was shot defending them, and at last lay quietly asleep in the green wilderness he loved so well, with a lock of golden hair upon his breast, and a smile on his face which seemed to say that Aslauga's Knight had fought his last fight and was at peace. Stuffy became an alderman, and died suddenly of apoplexy after a public dinner. Dolly was a society man of mark till he lost his money, when he found congenial employment in a fashionable tailoring establishment. Demi became a partner, and lived to see his name above the door, and Rob was a professor at Laurence College; but Teddy eclipsed them all by becoming an eloquent and famous clergyman, to the great delight of his astonished mother. And now, having endeavoured to suit everyone by many weddings, few deaths, and as much prosperity as the eternal fitness of things will permit, let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall for ever on the March family.

 “I hated Alcott’s choice of Jo’s marriage. Fixed that marriage for ya. Ain’t I the clever one.”

Dusts hands.

The End.

Yet there was so much more in Alcott's Jo and Joe's  Professor.***

~~~~~~~~~~~

*      More about why Jo March loves Professor Bhaer and can marry him in Part III.

**    Can't do that because it would kill her golden goose.

***  See the current Jane Austen travesty running on PBS – Sanditon.  Wasn’t Death Comes To Pemberly bad enough for them?

Monty Python / Terry Jones, Chaucer & the 100 Years War

     . . . . The announcement of Terry Jones's death seems to have revived the controversy he caused with his book, Chaucer's Knight: The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (1980). 

The book went into 4th edition, which is high achievement for a work of literary, historical  criticism, written by a non-academic.

Jones argued that Chaucer's knight had been battle-hardened in the mercenary companies, fighting for plunder and pay, not for a sovereign's honor and glory. The knight's story of battle-hardened legendary Greek figures was to show real politic and war choices, in the manner of Machiavelli.  This made sense to me, considering Chaucer's era was that of the 14th century Edward Plantagenets.

Chaucer's King, Richard II, was the grandson of King Edward III. Richard's father was Edward, the Black Prince, who died of illness before his time. King Edward III was elderly, and died not long after, leaving England's future in the hands of a boy king and regents, none of whom had the brilliance and sheer capacity for ruling, hard work or warring possessed by Edward I and Edward III. 

These are the times of the Hundred Years War. The English military strategy of chauvachée ruled. For those unfamiliar with the term, chauvachée meant no rules, no decorum: the army lived off the land, plundered everything it could eat and carry, burned the rest, and killed civilians, including women and children, as a matter of purpose. *

The Hundred Years War was a golden age for mercenary war lords and their 'Free Companies." One of the most famous and richest was that of English John Hawkwood.* Joining up with Hawkwood's mercenaries was the foundation of many an English family's rise in fortune and rank, as was the chauvachée plundering of France by members of the English armies. Used to plundering at will with little or no repercussion, some of the nobility and unemployed mercenaries and soldiers during truces took doing the same in parts of the realm of England.  It wasn't a very good time for many in England in the dotage years of King Edward III, and the boy king Richard's, and, then, King Richard II's own reign.**

So, count on someone with a high sense of humor, satire and irony -- as we see in every frame of Monty Python works -- to recognize humor, satire and irony, and mockery of genteel Romance-fiction traditions in the work of another great artist like Chaucer.  But as with the placement of slavery as central to the history of the American War of Independence, the Constitution, the War of the Rebellion, traditionalists of literary scholarship tended to clutch pearls when first confronted with such irreverent revisionist literary history.

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

*      There are concrete descriptions of what a campaign of chauvachée meant for entire departments of France in Maurice Druon's historical fiction series, The Accursed Kings.
Also in the excellent biography, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III Father of the English Nation (2006), by Ian Mortimer.

* *   Arthur Conan Doyle's favorite of his own works is an historical novel titled by the name Hawkwood's mercenaries were given, The White Company. There are numerous historical figures in The White Company, including the Black Prince, but Hawkwood is not among them. 

***   Richard II was deposed in 1399.