. . . . Every day and every night gets colder. Every morning I wake up to a temperature lower than the one with which we got up yesterday. We're now in the zone of below freezing day and night, and at night, way below freezing, though we haven't yet hit single digits.
The insurrection continues, with threats to the lives and well being of various Democrats in the House and Senate, even made by members of the chambers out loud and in public -- not to mention everywhere else. They are intent in bringing this all down and establishing an authoritarian white supremacist, radically religiously intolerant nationalism instead.
Chaos with vaccines here and everywhere else, when it comes to manufacture, administration and distribution.
Still engaged in transferring / copying data to the Desktop. This doesn't mean I've been laggard about it, rather there's a lot of other things more urgent to do all the time, and once a day's rota of those tasks have been completed, I'm not in the mood to keep watch on whether a data base has paused its download, completely downloaded, or whether it has transferred / uploaded successfully to the Desktop. I am looking forward to having this finished though, so I can change the display on the desktop screen to one of my own photos. But right now One Drive is uploading all the files and folders to itself from my hard drive, so this computer hardly functions. But it should, considering how much bandwidth we have and the speed measurement. But there ya are -- still stalling out.
Why yes, one can find oneself really hating computers and the digital universe.
As always, the end of the day, is good part of the day! We've embarked upon a new book, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (2019), by Julius Scott. Incorporating content from his dissertation, Scott wrote it after receiving his doctorate from Duke in 1989. It didn't find a publisher though, until recently.
As seen in the Penguin-Verso press release, among the book's admirers are quite a few scholars I also admire deeply, such as Marcus Rediker:
ABOUT THE COMMON WIND
Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History
A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era
The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.
By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved.
Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.
Tonight, it's The Dig, a Netflix film that released today.
The Dig is a drama film directed by Simon Stone, based on the 2007 novel of the same name by John Preston, which reimagines the events of the 1939 excavation of Sutton Hoo. It stars Carey Mulligan, Ralph Fiennes, Lily James, Johnny Flynn, Ben Chaplin, Ken Stott, Archie Barnes and Monica Dolan.
If you are not familiar with Sutton Hoo, here is the website for what is still and active dig, as well as museum.
As mentioned above the cold here is severe and evidently plans to be in residence in our region for quite some time, at least into next week. There is going to be a lot of snow too, it seems, starting sometime Sunday? all through the mid-Atlantic. Have no idea how much we should expect here. But as cold as it is, we may get more snow than rain this round. This is the weather for which was made the Finnish wool cape el V brought back to me from a European tour some years back. It keeps me comfortable when the steam heat hasn't kicked in for a while. Excellent for watching 'tv'!
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