Everything Is Different Again

      . . . .  The desktop computer and 24" monitor ordered last week arrived on Sunday.

In other words, while still trying to do all the things one does and needs to do all the time, without enough time to do them, feeling ever more cramped, harassed and failure-ish, one is dealing with everything on screen being in different places, older stuff like Office not quite so compatible with the New! Improved! More Expensive! Office, which one no longer buys and has, like the Word program I have on the old laptop, but rents annually.  So yes, more expensive, as the last Word program I bought was from 2013, and it still operates just fine.  Plus, I'm so comfortable with it I never have to think about what I'm doing -- just write and do whatever.  This is different now, on the New! Much More Powerful! Blahblahblah Win10 machine.  Like everything else.

Plus, it's currently very cold, real winter!, and is staying that way into the foreseeable future.  Nights into the mid-teens, days, top temps under 40°.  I seem to have forgotten what this is like.  Which adds yet more tasks to the ever increasingly multi-task of dressing to do anything from going Out to going downstairs to do the laundry.  Why yes, we too are double masking now.

I suppose I will get used to it fairly soon.

What is puzzling though, is I don't feel as immersed in my watching of series and films and so on on this 24" screen as I do on the 17" laptop screen.  Watching on that screen, was literally tunnel vision, that blocked out everything else around me, which is o so welcome in These Times.  The larger screen -- well blocking out everything else isn't happening so easily.

If this were my and most of the world's biggest problem though, wouldn't it be a grand world indeed?

Gotta say though, that new monitor, on it, scenes such as this, just pop and sizzle in a way they didn't quite, no matter how sharp, on the laptop's more compressed pixalation.

The opening scene from The Flame Trees of Thika (1981) adapted from Elspeth Huxley's memoir (pub. 1959) of growing up in British East Africa -- Kenya, on the coffee plantation her family tried to establish back in 1913.  The series is currently available for streaming on Acorn TV.  I have read the book -- and other works of Elspeth Huxley, and I did see this quite some years ago, on dvd.  It's interesting to me how much more experience and knowledge I bring to this work,  and to the histories of African nations and culture generally, between then and now.

Covid-19 Vaccination(s) Comng Soon To An Undisclosed Location Near You! / Reading Wednesday

      . . . .  Governor announced vaccine arrival in our state  by December 15th, so surely to all the other states too?

The sooner the better, but there's a really long time to go, a really long time.  Also, recall, it seems no matter which Big Pharma created the vaccine one is to receive, two shots are necessary to be protected (nobody knows for how long the protection will be effective, but most likely we'll have to do this at least every 12 months).

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced today that New York's first Pfizer vaccine delivery is expected to come on December 15th, and will be enough doses for 170,000 New Yorkers. [Which means, since each vaccination to be effective must be administered twice, for about 85,000 NYers.]

A second round of 170,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine, which will constitute the second dosage for those designated people, will arrive 21 days later. The state is expecting additional allocations of the Pfizer vaccine, as well as the Moderna vaccine, later in the month or in early January as well.

Cuomo added that by the end of December, the Trump administration suggests there will be enough to vaccinate another 20 million people with two dosages across the country, making up 6% of the population of the United States.

Per CDC recommendations, New York's vaccination program will prioritize healthcare workers and residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities in phase one. There are approximately 85,000 nursing home residents and 130,000 nursing home staff members in New York, so the first round of vaccines will not cover all of those people. Cuomo hopes that the second round of vaccines later in the month will at least cover that entire group of 210,000+ people....

Keep in mind, please, this date is for arrival of vaccine -- though since it seems necessary it needs to be kept super-cold, They should probably being going to work immediately.

But will they?

 So it not only does distribution mean jabbing people, but paperwork so they can be jabbed three weeks? two weeks? later, again.  Records must be kept!  Recall, my state is still counting ballots from the election last month.  Among the multiple, well, to be honest, uncounted, problems -- piles of ballots from who knows where because the yellow stickies fell off.

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

It's Reading Wednesday Somebody/ies Say!  Here is a novel I would recommend for those who are interested in King Arthur and historical fiction set during the Dark Ages.  (Which of course I am interested because so little has been known about these years, but, thanks to archeaology and relentless scholarship, we discover a little more history all the time.

The Lost Queen (2018) was the first installment in Signe Pike's projected trilogy.  The Forgotten Kingdom (2020) is the trilogy's middle volume, and writer's second novel. Unlike many middle volumes, this one is more compelling in terms of both character and action, than the first one.  The writer writes vivid descriptions of the natural world of the setting -- as much as possible she's visited her sites, and what remains of them. The result is that I felt I was seeing what the characters are described as seeing. It is composed around the Arthurian origin mythologies that are centered location-wise in what we now call Scotland -- north of The Wall. The chronology is the later 6th century; the Romans are gone, Angles are 'invading', and to my personal historic thinking, Europe and England already have had nearly a century of the Dark Ages.* The Christian persecutions of the Old Religions in the region has been well underway for decades already. Considering this isn't the Victorian re-imagining of the age, as in Idylls of the King, well, yes, this books does contain brutal, bloody, cruel and abusive scenes.  It wouldn't be right if it did not.  Some victims survive, some do not, and others survive but are forever affected. The writer has good instincts, to do justice, but not dwell or revel.  

*    Why do I persist in calling the eras from late in the 5th Century to maybe the 9th Century and Charlemagne, the Dark Ages? It'such an old-fashioned way to view history, mostly considered out of date for any up to date medieval historian -- rather like maintaining the War of the Rebellion of the USA's 19th century wasn't caused by the issue of slavery, or that Rome 'fell' in the 5th century.  I keep calling these years the Dark Ages  because it was in the 5th century that Christianity became definitively official state religion of Rome, East as well as West, the plagues and famines which came relentlessly, until quite some time later, by which time the 'classical' or 'pagan' worlds had been erased for practical purposes, i.e. official, state, political, legal, religious monopoly by the Church., and things started to get crazy due to Christians determing intolerance of anything not determined by authority -- which led to many slaughters of each other, as well as of 'pagans and all the other Others.

These two Romes did build out from all the classical Roman political and administrative structures -- thus to my mind Rome didn't fall either, buy that didn't stop the Dark Ages of plagues, wars, famines and many other catastrophes. What was left was a shell within which cruel intolerance festered -- kind of like the restaurants here that now rule the streets -- they have been built out of the far more stable structures of the indoor restaurants.  Indeed, they have come to be called, "Streeteateries," (even a step down from 'eateries,' a designation NY food reviewers are fond of) --  and are hit by cars -- frequently.  Still as that was still Rome, people still eat and drink in these flimsy pretenses of fine dining.

An Amiga and I Talk About Sanditon

       . . . . . Sanditon (2019) ITV-PBS.  8 frackin’ episodes!  How can there be that many 48 minute tv episodes from a unfinished novel that only had 12 chapters?

It premiered in the US this past Sunday night on PBS, showing the first two episodes, not just the first one. So much has been lifted whole out of other Austen novels for this series, mostly, of course, from Pride and Prejudice, particularly in the dialogue, and scenes repeating or at least referencing the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice.

And people talking about a second season, though ITV said it cancelled the series as not enough viewers / unenthusiastic - hostile - derisive reponse.  The UK reviewers at least, really didn’t like it – dull and tedious. Out of what could they fashion a second season anyway? 

The UK viewers also strongly objected to the depictions of sexual behavior that departed so sharply from the Austen universe as Austen depicted. The writers for Sanditon felt they MUST give us as villains, a sexually transgressive half sister-brother duo.  The bro’s a serial, violent seducer-rapist. There’s a strong suggestion of the two of them doing what even half sibs should not do, while living mostly within a room in their crumbling mansion frescoed with naked men doing ... what exactly? Really, Austen was able to show schemers determined to get All the Stuff without going that far. 

My favorite Mansfield Park, BBC 1983

Henry Crawford

Mary Crawford

The splendid Crawford brother and sister pair of Mansfield Park -- they created havoc and crossed boundaries -- certainly the brother did! -- but we see how their charm, likeability and worldly joie de vivre -- even their sophisticated sense of the comic and absurd -- allowed for their seductions, without rape and violence of that sort. These two are as interesting to the reader as they are to the the characters of Mansfield Park.

Even the way the writers did it, the pretext to get a lively but moral ingenue to this sea-side resort in the making, was hard to believe.  Really, even in those days? Responsible parents like the Heywoods would allow their adolescent daughter to go off to stay with the Parkers, people they’ve known for, o all of 5 minutes?

Even if Tom Parker is played by Kris Marshall!?* whom last I knew as the detective on Death in Paradise, who left the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Marie after two seasons, to marry his love back in London. I saw Marshall first in Love Actually (2003) as the horny Brit kid trying to get laid who travels to the US to do it. Remarkably, one of the three midwestern babes who helps him out of his virginity was January Jones, who played Betty Draper, the unpleasant first wife of Don Draper on Mad Men.  Gotta say this for Marshall the actor -- he does get around some beautiful women, over and over and over again!*

A friend writes to me about Austen's Sanditon vs. ITV-PB's Sanditon after she too watched these first two episodes on offer:

 ... Reread Sanditon. [What Austen wrote] almost fills up the first ep. The ball sequence and everything follows is invention ... also kind of Northanger Abbey ... it's [NA's] Catherine Moorland, Not Charlotte Heywood. [Austen's Sanditon's]CH was a sensible young woman of two and twenty, ie, a bit too long on the shelf but not at all a husband-hunter. It's only a fragment. but that ball sequence is PURE Catherine Moorland.

Here's the thing about Charlotte Heywood - she is an observer figure. She stands apart and judges the other characters but doesn't enter into their lives. She exhibits no romantic interest in them. (This might have changed if the book had been finished - or maybe not. It would have been an unusual and rather progressive narrative strategy.)

But this Charlotte Heywood has been buried in the TV series.

My response:

     This is all true -- and playing Charlotte as Austen wrote her would also be a most interesting acting challenge, and worth watching.

But the actor playing Charlotte isn't up to that any more than the writing is up to Austen. Writers: NO WE MUST HAVE ROMANCE! WE MUST DO ELIZABETH AND DARCY ALL OVER AGAIN ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THAT’S ALL THE LADIES ADORE AND THAT’S ALL THE LADIES KNOW.

Especially the tv Darcy and Elizabeth of 1995, which itself took some serious liberties with Austen’s Pride and Prejudice text, like Gerwig does with Alcott's Little Women. Which mostly means, at least for this Sanditon, we must squeeze in as much nekkid men as the screen can hold.

The ghastly Pineapple luncheon though, in terms of how things surely were and, tragically, the way things still are right this minute, was remarkably on the money: consider what's going on right this minute with Meghan Markle:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/exclusive-meghan-markle-targeted-by-hundreds-of-racist-and-sexist-tweets-amid-plan-to-step-back_n_5e1f5b28c5b673621f6f7965

Plus there are so many more racist comments and actions that can rather more subtle than these and the way the hideous person Ann Reid is playing shows so well (like, that member of the royal family / court? who to meet the Duchess to be, wore a blackamoor pin). Reid's performance is far and away the best thing in the piece. The actor playing Charlotte, I saw last as the vapid Princess Clode in the last season or so of the ridiculous, non-historical period series, Reign, in which we see Mary Queen of Scots host a run-way fashion show in her Scotland castle.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*  Woo! does that resort on the coast of England broadcast cold!  And the actors had to get in the water!  But it looked almost equally cold out of the water and inside walls.  All the actors who have played the detective on Death in Paradise have talked extensively of how difficult it is to do this series in the climate of Guadeloupe. So it was probably more pleasant for Marshall to shoot in cold England. 

Reading Books! The Sir Robert Carey Historical Mystery Series

     . . . . I have discovered the Sir Robert Carey historical murder mysteries by P.F. Chisholm. I am reading the first volume, A Famine of Horses (1994). 

It was the title that drew me in.  How could it not have?  What ever in the world is a 'famine of ... horses?' Then, I discovered after enjoying the first pages, that there were several more books featuring Sir Robert Carey.

A Famine of Horses is the first volume of the waning days of the Virgin Queen (the historical Carey was a favored member of her court), and then in the following reign of King James. I believe the historical personage did gallop mightily to Scotland to be the first to bring the news to James's court that the Queen had died, and that he now was king of  Scotland and England and Wales.

Yes, the author is that George MacDonald Fraser, author of the Flashman series, etc.

The geography is mostly the infamous Borderlands, with Carlisle the governing center.  Though anyone who has read George MacDonald Fraser's Steel Bonnets (1971) knows, there was little governing going on in this Wild West march region, ruled by rival warlords and rievers.* Carey initially is sent to Carlisle to take on the outlaws, and, hopefully, instill a small modicum at least, of law and order, and get rather more revenue to the Queen's treasury.

One does feel that what makes the central character of Carey such a successful one is that Carey wrote books himself, including his still highly readable Memoirs of Robert Cary, Earl of Monmouth. Various versions can be found, as well as this free to read, online version. 

That Carey is almost surely the grandson of Henry VIII, therefore a cousin of Elizabeth, via Anne Bolyen's sister Mary, in many ways makes him the ideal figure to impose the Queen's will about these ungovernable sorts.  Carey has the roaring temper that gets even those raging inhabitants take note and heed of both his actions and words.  Yet, he is most certainly also a courtier par excellence -- which is how he maintained the Queen's good will.

The historical details in this first book in the series sometimes feel more than a little self-consciously inserted by the author, but they are interesting period details, so never mind.  There is are thrills, suspense and adventure galore -- and, of course, a romance.

--------------------
*  It is from this region, as well as the equally wild northern Irish lands that came to the colonies and the US, the Presbyterian "Scotch-Irish," whose most famous scion was Andrew Jackson.  These people settled widely in the less coveted regions of the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee.

"Three Around Farnham" - Reading Wednesday

    A discussion in the UK Guardian got me to dig out my well-thumbed, well-scribbled in copy of a cultural-economic study of English literature, which I haven't looked at in a long time.

"Three Around Farnham" is the title Raymond Williams gave the 11th chapter of his classic The Country and the City (1973), a survey the changing attitudes toward country and city in English Literature.

Parson Gilbert White

   The "Three Around Farnham" are writers who lived within the same 30 mile radius around Farnham: Gilbert White (1720-1793). Jane Austen (1775-1817) and William Cobbett (1763 - 1835). What each sees -- and equally significant do not see -- in their shared countryside are vastly different. Williams does a comparison and contrast of these three's vision of the country and its relationship to the city in their time in order to describe the price extracted from the laboring classes.

William Cobbett

  The very food that has been plundered from the laborers, by enclosure of public lands and plunging wages has gone to prop up the prosperity of the higher classes during the consolidation of England's Industrial Revolution and colonialism (slavery)-- and decades of nearly perpetual war and the extortionate taxes in money and kind put upon the poor. However, the laboring, voteless, thus non-represented classes, get nothing back from these extortions of land and cash taxation.  Their betters, however, with a vote and members in Parliament get in return other sources of income from government, the army and navy, the church, the law and opportunities for doing business between all these institutions and the colonies.

  Read Cobbett's Rural Rides (1830) and look in vain for the country walks of Pride and Prejudice (1813).

   However, the other two knew White's book well, and must have recognized some of what he saw -- White was was a pioneer naturalist / ornithologist. Parson White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne,* or just The Natural History of Selborne (1789).

Cobbett's Rides

While White remains at least a sidebar in most English literature studies that cover the 18th and early 19th century writers now, it was different in the days of Austen and Cobbett.. Austen was a precocious fourteen and living 17 miles away in Steventon the year's White's book was published. Her brother wrote a poem about the book.  On August 31st 1811, when Jane was 36, she dined with White's niece (Rebecca Parker Terry) at Hill House in Alton.

Cobbett, the pioneering social and economic critic of the conditions imposed upon the rural laborer by those who live in the many lovely homes that populate this 30 mile radius around Farnham, refers to White's book in his spoken and written opinions, as can be seen here.

One of Williams's conclusion as to what this means to English literature is expressed by his description of Austen's keen powers of observation, put down in writing within the houses set off from the roads Cobbett rode, observing right on the verge of these same roads that run far off from those houses, the hovels in which the poor attempted to survive rain and cold.

Nevertheless, Williams finds embedded in the familiar texts of her novels, all these social changes, and how the families of all her communities are rising, maintaining, or, as with several figures, as is clearly described in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Persuasion, falling.  Those whose fall is staved off, are those whose younger sons find other economic security away from the entailed estates, often in the Church (much like Gilbert White himself), and even the great estates themselves such as Darcy's -- are sustained by other means than the land itself, whether from plantations in the West Indies as with Mansfield Park, or as hand wavium explained in Emma, whose fortune of 30,000 pounds comes "from other sources,"** not her father's small estate itself.

I'd argue further. while Austen tends to be assumed to be always looking inward, and at personal relationships, the relationships themselves are created even, by the social changes that are coming with this consolidation of the Industrial Revolution and imperial power.

------------------------------

* Can be found on Gutenberg, here.

**   So somewhere -- and not so long ago in reality -- lands granted by Henry's VIII team in the Dissolution,  a fortune gained from piracy and privateering in Elizabeth's time, or lands achieved during the Commonwealth, or, closer to Emma's era, from manufacture, slavery, or other not so respectable means that about which surely Emma, Tory snob of snobs, would prefer us not to speculate.

Reading Wednesday -- Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance

Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli: A Strange Romance (2015) is by Daisy Hay, a Brit academic in Literature. This background explains the narrative clumsiness accorded accorded by narrative's lack of focused through-line of "romance". Speaking from relative experience here, one is allowed to speculate that this subtitle was strongly suggested (never imposed!) by the editor of the book.

As the author frequently informs us, this was no romantic marriage, but one of mutual convenience.  Disraeli -- Dizzy -- was fabulously in debt, desperate to be returned to parliament in order to be immune from arrest by his multitude of creditors.  He was as professionally frustrated as both author and politician as he was in Society as a Jewish outlier, despite his conversion to the Church of England. It had long been the case that a successful political career was nearly impossible for dissenters and non-conformists. Without belonging to the CoE, many other professions were also closed -- until 1907, one couldn't even get a degree from Oxford without allegiance to the Anglican Church.

The woman Disraeli married in 1839 was 12 years older than he, burdened with a semi-scandalous reputation that was founded in fact as well as gossip. His own reputation included not so sotto voce observations regarding his relationships with other men, including fellow author and member of parliament, Bulwer Lytton.

Mary Ann Viney-Evans, 1st Viscountess Beaconsfield (1792-1872)  was a petite, vivacious, good-natured and very pretty young woman.

In her maturity Mary Ann was a beautiful woman, and remained so for many years.

Disraeli encountered Mary Ann first in political drawing rooms, as wife of Member of Parliament, Wyndam Lewis. Disraeli and Mary Ann liked each other in these situations, and encouraged each other's biting observations. He saw much more of her, and more intimately, when he stood as companion candidate from Wycomb, with her husband.  Mary Ann was an enthusiastic, tireless and very effective campaigner. Not long after their election, Wyndam suddenly fell dead in his study. His friends urged Disraeli to seize this opportunity, which many other suitors already had set out to gain for themselves as soon as Wyndam was in the ground. Mary Ann was for ambitious, thwarted young men, a beautiful, wealthy widow, that essential conveyance to financial security found so commonly in history and fiction. As for Mary Ann, a husband would allow her freedom of action and behavior that weren't possible for a single woman in Society. As well, young and filled with energy, she found him very attractive.  Wyndam had been years older than she.

Less romantic than that is difficult to claim.  But -- they enjoyed each other's company. Initially.

What followed marriage was not smooth, particularly as Disraeli constantly lied to her about the extent of his debts. She constantly had to retrench her finances, sell off her possessions, negotiate and borrow, to pull him from the fires of bankruptcy and arrest in the periods that he wasn't in parliament. On her side the big bumps were her excessive public expression, dressing excessively and as time went on, in a manner not appropriate to a woman of her age,  and. most of all, her objections to 'sharing' him with friends, colleagues and his family.

We are interested in the lives of these two people and their relationship with each other, because they are significant political figures, and, as well, signature figures in their development of their era's social and literary conditions -- and how things changed from when they were young, to full-blown Victorian middle-class ideals. Benjamin Disraeli was one of the foremost politicians of the Victorian era. He was prime minister twice -- indeed, Queen Victoria's favorite minister, a condition founded upon his devotion to his wife, and hers to him. Queen Victoria even elevated Mary Ann in her own right to the peerage.

"On November 24, 1868, Mary Ann ceased to be Mrs. Disraeli and became instead Viscountess Beaconsfield."

Which elevation turned out to be extremely popular with the public, to everyone's surprise.

Most English majors and most historians who deal at all with the 19th century have a sense of whom Benjamin Disraeli was, which includes his colorful early life as a dandy and aspiring literary man in the vogue of the Romantics such as Byron and Shelley. Even now, lit majors, specializing in the history of the novel, and historians specializing in the politics of the Victorian era, still read his fiction for insights into politics, religion and cultural matters of the age.

However, knowledge of his wife among both English professors and historians is less common. That Mary Ann was extraordinary -- or at least socially singular and eccentric -- is beautifully described by Hays. The author successfully makes her case, that without Mary Ann, who is judged as inferior in intellect, breeding, education and importance, Disraeli would never have risen to the pinnacles of social and political success that he did.

Most English majors and most historians who deal at all with the 19th century have a sense of whom Benjamin Disraeli was, including his colorful early life as a dandy and aspiring literary man in the vogue of the Romantics such as Byron and Shelley. Even now, lit majors, specializing in the history of the novel, and historians specializing in the politics of the Victorian era, still read his fiction for insights into politics, religions and cultural matters of the age.

However, knowledge of his wife among both English professors and historians is less common.  That Mary Ann was extraordinary -- or at least socially singular and eccentric -- is beautifully described by Hays. The author successfully makes her case, that without Mary Ann, who is judged as inferior in intellect, breeding, education and importance, Disraeli would never have risen to the pinnacles of social and political success that he did.

Disraeli in his dandy period.

This is where and when romance enters. This had been a marriage of convenience for them both. They didn't have much in common, other than Mary Ann's undeviating devotion to his career even when he was nobody.  When he became successful, he was no longer dependent on her as previously and their lives diverged. In the earlier years of their marriage they had mutually manufactured a poetic fantasy of their grand romance, which faded under the pressures of debt and lies (his) jealousy and insecurity (hers of his relationships with his sister, other men and political cronies and work), lack of children, her volatility.  But as time went on, he became authentically devoted to her, both from gratitude and from recognition of her particular gifts for making friends and inspiring affection -- including with the notoriously difficult Queen Victoria herself. That in itself makes the book a valuable portal into the Victorian era.

Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton PC, was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and politician (1803 - 1873). Best-selling Victorian novelist, including works such as The Last Days of Pompeii; also a Member of Parliament.  He and his close friends, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, were infamous in their circles for the Parisian sexcations they took together a couple of times a year.

It's also enlightening to read the descriptions of another Victorian famous name at the intersection of literature and politics -- Bulwer Lytton, who, with his wife Rosina, whom he treated so abominably, was a close friend to both the Wyndams and Disraeli. After reading the descriptions of Lytton and his family coolly ridding themselves of the 'nuisance' of Rosina by committing her to an insane asylum, one cannot but believe that this is what provoked another close friend of Lytton and Dickens, Wilkie Collins, into writing The Woman in White (1859).

As in The Woman in White, Rosina was released from that asylum by the actions of her loyal, loving female friends. In Collins's novel it is the devotion of the half-sister, who rides to the rescue, behaving as a man. (Unwomanly behavior is one of  Rosina's great sins, as far as Bulwer and his friends were concerned -- meaning she was vocal about objecting to his infidelities and other bad treatment, rather than meekly accepting everything.) The Woman in White is remarkably woman-centric and woman positive for the day, centering women's actions for rescuing themselves from the legal and social constraints of the time.

Mary Ann was often laughed at for not being demure enough, for flouting the conventions of behavior, speech and dress for the increasingly rigidly ordered drawing rooms and parlors of the Victorian era.  Hay frequently employs examples such as Rosina Lytton out of the circles of Mary Ann's friends and relatives to illustrate how fortunate Mary Ann's own circumstances turned out.

Mary Ann's intelligence understood how differently, financially and socially, her life was from so many of the women she knew.  She understood that luck, not virtue, played a huge role in who survived prosperously, and who did not. She was generous to many of the women she knew for whom poverty and struggle were their daily condition.

Beyond this however, for anyone who is interested in Victorian England and how it became Victorian, the lives of these people, spent together, traverse that trajectory, from the Regency era, when married people were allowed, with proper decorum, wives as much as husbands, to have lovers -- to the purely domestic ideal of the angel in the house.

Politics, history and manners among this privileged set of people at the top of their society, are extremely well detailed.  Wherever possible Hay has provided substantial extracts from the Disraeli's personal letters, journals and from newspaper accounts, which are valuable time-traveling devices in themselves.

Personally, considering what a role in politics they both played, I would loved to have seen some mention of their attitudes about slavery and the U.S. Civil War, but alas, there is none.

Still, as far as romance goes, Benjamin Disraeli did marry again, someone significantly younger, also wealthy.

Just In Time For the Weekend Storm

The library notified me this AM that three of my holds were available for pick-up today, just in time to be trapped inside for a long weekend of snow, wind and maybe also ice and sleet and rain, beginning for at 4 AM Saturday.  If the storm effects that arrive here (it's going to be much worse further south) turn out as bad as They Say the potential is, we're supposed to stay inside for as long as possible, during the storm and the initial clean-up after.  Honestly, after having lost so much time traveling, the holidays, then traveling, then the long holiday weekend  and now another 3 - 4 day weekend due to weather, I could really do without this hiatus.

However, we're ready with all we need to be ready with.

Plus, now, three books I've been looking forward to reading: Cornwell's latest Saxon Chronicles, Warriors of the Storm (so appropriate a title for this weekend!), the biography of a Victorian marriage, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli, by Daisy Hay, and Robert Harris's concluding fictionalization of his three volume life of Cicero, Dictator.

Additionally I have a dvd of a 1997 BBC production of Wilkie Collins's novel, The Woman in White.

Mostly though I'll be working on my 2015 Best Reading Round-up.

All I know so far is that Life On The Mississippi, and, Isabella: Warrior Queen, are on it. There are more, of course, but I haven't been able to get myself to go through my reading and watching journal for 2015 yet. It's a lot slimmer with commentary than previous years -- reading almost solely for The American Slave Coast, and mostly not reading at all,  in the final quarter of 2015.

As well, we'll  have to devote some time in the next two days getting our 3 -4 months calendar in order. We have some dates already scheduled, including here in townL the CUNY Grad Center, a bookstore in Harlem, The Museum of the Moving Image, and the Jumel Mansion. We've got other dates in Boston, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia -- and New Orleans again -- so far.

I guess we'll stay occupied, even if we feel trapped.

At least this evening we get to to attend the reception - event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art around African art.  Since the storm doesn't start until after midnight there was no need to cancel this.  I'm so glad since it means I'll get to see the exhibit of Ancient Egyptian Art: The Middle Kingdom, that closes on Sunday. I can use my Christmas camera some more.

Reading Wednesday - The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects

The Brontë Cabinet: Three Lives in Nine Objects (2015) W.W. Norton

English professor Deborah Lutz applies contextual historical material culture to illuminate the lives and works of the Brontës via, as the title so speaks, nine material objects that have survived since their deaths.

The chapter titled "Death Made Material" centers the amethyst bracelet that features on the book's jacket, worn by Charlotte, made from "the entwined hair of Emily and Anne."  The bracelet was made most probably by a professional "hairworker," a profession that employed thousands in 1830's and 40's Britain.

Mourning jewelry as part of the grieving process was only part of what hairworkers provided, but objects incorporating a beloved dead person's hair was the largest part of the profession.

Manuals for how people could and prepare the hair in their own homes and incorporate it into other objects, such as keepsake portraits of the dearly departed, drawn landscapes and tableaus incorporating graveyards and other melancholy signatures were available and popular.

As would be the case with this sad though very talented family, much of The Brontë Cabinet deals with illness, death, grief and mourning. However it also retrieves the economic and social constructs around the matters of women who write professionally, household pets and genteel women's letter writing -- which latter brings us to the development and history of mail, the penny post, Valentines and other matters.

The author, not needing to, doesn't mention that as much as hairworkers, letter writing and the post office are dead letters now.  That, though not expressed, says more about how distant in time now the Brontës are, than anything else.  Yet their work endures, and we remain as fascinated by anything that had physical contact with this family as the celebrity seekers in their own time, As the author does point out this determination to own something of figures that impact their fans is as old as saints' relics and this is anything but a dead matter.

Often, as with many Brontë collections the relics need not even be authentic. What matters is what the possessor believes s/he possesses.

Queer History

Here the countdown is already happening and the annual excitement that is Gay Pride in June is already building.  What used to be a Gay Pride weekend, and then week, has expanded.  Gay couples -- even groups -- from other countries and states are visibly plumping up the usual tourist hordes on the sidewalks and in the restaurants.

Thus this recently published book fits right into the current ambience,  Double Lives – A History of Sex and Secrecy at Westminster by Michael Block.

The many well known Brit politicos who were gay or bi sexual include Winston Churchill.  That was a surprise to me, at least.

From the Guardian's Books section: .

There are now 32 openly gay MPs, but for much of the 20th century many politicians were forced to lead complex, clandestine sexual lives. Michael Bloch tells their stories and salutes their powers of subterfuge. . . . 

As a young cavalry officer, the Old Harrovian Winston Churchill was accused of having “participated in acts of gross immorality of the Oscar Wilde type” with fellow cadets at Sandhurst; but he successfully sued his accuser for libel, and there is no evidence that, as an adult, he engaged in physical homosexual relationships. Yet he was far from being straightforwardly heterosexual. Although he worshipped his beautiful American mother, he showed a lifelong aversion to women. (In Churchill’s only novel Savrola, the obviously autobiographical hero has a purely chaste relationship with the heroine, obviously based on Churchill’s mother.) He seems to have had a low sex drive, and married rather cold-bloodedly, aged 33, for social and dynastic reasons, just after being appointed to Asquith’s cabinet. Though he came to depend on his “Clemmie” in many ways, she was often exasperated by his emotional unresponsiveness and treatment of her as a child-bearer and housekeeper, and more than once considered leaving him. 

The full book excerpt is here.

Elizabeth Gaskell's Home Reopened

Victorian novelist, Elizabeth Gaskell is the author of works that still appeal today to certain sorts of readers (including myself): North and South, Wives and Daughters, Cranford. These three have been adapted as eminently watchable television series.

Further, many lovers of the history of the novel in English are grateful to Mrs. Gaskell for writing the posthumous biography of her dear friend, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857 -- first edition).

However, not everyone is / was pleased with this biography, particularly once the previous century's second-wave feminism emerged.  21st century's fannish approaches to literary criticism, reviewing, writing and reading particularly perceive Gaskell's biography as a repellent sanitation of Brontë, patron saint of victimized women of passion in possession of the specialness gene.

Plymouth House,  121 Upper Rumford Street, to which the Gaskells moved in 1842 from a slightly smaller house in the same district, in which they'd lived since 1832.

Plymouth House today, restored.

Could this sort of feminist quarreling have contributed to the 20-year struggle to preserve and restore Gaskell's home? Having re-read Gaskell's biography of the author of Jane Eyre several times at different periods of my own life, it feels to me as though the writer of the linked-to essay is willfully misreading the work -- in order to view Ms Brontë through her own lens of desire that reduces all literature and other entertainments to "doing it!" fast and furious and often, preferably with the ripping of the clothes off. But that's why we keep writing about these writers, because we have different perspectives.

Plymouth House is located in Ardwick, which by the mid-nineteenth century, had become a "pleasant and wealthy" suburb of Manchester, Manchester, which was a cradle of English industrialization. This proximity to the horrors to which factory workers were subject provoked Gaskell' s sensibility to write with such sensitivity on what were then called social subjects, as with her successful novel, North and South.

Complete story in the Manchester Evening News, here.

And more here in the UK Guardian.

Reading Wednesday: The American Slave Coast + Memoirs of A Fox-Hunting Man, Tuchman, Faulkner & Willam Alexander Percy

This is the week of the final read-through, revisions, fact-checking, etc. of The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry.  This is adding to the current seasonal dissonance created first by the hottest weather of the entire summer, because, while this week is the start of everything new for so many as classes resume here in NYC in every level from pre-K to university, we are finishing a multi-year project. Or, at least, finishing this aspect of the project -- we're working on a presentation of some of the material complete with musicians, singers and other readers ....

Yesterday was the first real scorcher of this year, with temps in the high 90's as well as very high humidity. The copy shop to which I took the thumb drive to print out, yet again, the first chapters of TASC, had a line out into the street of anxious NYU kids, purchasing the spiral bound class packets that their professors had put together and the copy center had xeroxed and assembled, to be paid for with NYU's own cash card, which each student presumably is issued (NYU has its own currency, i.e. on that card).

I was so glad to not be a student, teaching or, worst of all -- a freshman!

It was very hot and stuffy in that little Asian-owned copy shop, the only one left in the neighborhood, staffed by brilliant young Asian girls -- who, by now, must as sick of seeing me come in with that thumb drive to have these pages once again printed out, as I am about doing it. It will be interesting to see, when we add up all the expenses for doing this book, how much we've spent on copying the drafts over the years.  The first year, of course, we didn't spend any money ourselves, since we could copy at the Center in C'town.

This was in every way a very expensive book to write,* even if we don't add in the cost of the extensive travel research we did, including going to England. Still, though some of the travel costs were off-set by paying gigs, this was no small sum. There is also the payment for permission to use certain illustrations -- as well as having again to re-purchase Photo Shop (though now Photo Shop no longer sells the program at all -- it only rents) to process our own photos and to restore the very poor quality of period newspaper advertisements and other illustrations.

Just the cost of living while doing this book, which has increased every few months -- well, that's why it's taken so long. There wasn't much time to just work on the book. There was all the other work taken on to support ourselves in the meantime.

All the while, even now, we keep learning more history instrumental to the founding causes as to why the Southern United States, of all the New World economies that included slavery, was the only one to be a slave society, its economy based on womb enslaved into perpetuity. It wasn't an accident by any means.The intention and the perspective which allow such an inhumane blindness to humanity and civil rights was embedded in the founding fathers of the Southern states even before the first settlements of Virginia and Carolina were founded.

As back home in Britain, their thinking was formed so much by their handling of their Irish plantations, so they expanded this immediately to enslavement for profit (as opposed to labor per se) of the natives. The native tribes, of course, as the African peoples in Africa, were in perpetual rivalry and conflict with each other, so they were ready at all times to betray each other and sell each other to the Carolinians, who were assiduous and methodical in collecting slaves from the natives and selling to the Caribbean colonies.

As always, reading of the brutality of our nation's founding centuries, it's quite a dissonance to switch the heart of British civility, as with Siegfried Sassoon's first volume of changed-names memoir of growing up into and out of World War I.  I began reading Memoirs of A Fox-Hunting Man, in the fall of 2011. I'd had the book on my shelves for years already. I was provoked finally into reading it by my experiences with the Eastern Shore fox hunting clubs.  However, the sheer uselessness of the narrator, Sassoon's fictionalized Sherston-self, as a callow, blind and selfish boy and youth (his own characterization of his younger self), and his entire class-ridden culture on the threshold of WWI, provoked

impatience, while the tiny font and skinny trim of my Faber and Faber paperback, and my worsening vision, provoked annoyance -- so, I put it down. Over the years I would read a chapter every few months, but never making any real progress with the work. However, re-reading / listening to audio versions of Barbara Tuckman's The Proud Tower and The Guns of August, made the last half of the Memoir so interesting -- or maybe he was old enough now? children and adolescents aren't generally very interesting reading for me -- I finished it over the weekend.

As well, I kept thinking of  Sassoon's Memoirs while this spring reading the history of Faulkner's and William Alexander Percy's Mississippi -- Mississippi with which I found myself so involved this year, historically, geographically, politically and culturally.  Both Americans, Faulker and Percy, both aristos in their worlds as much as Sassoon was in his, had very different wars than Sassoon -- yet, for all three of them, their wars were shaped by their being embedded in their world's ruling classes, where everyone knows everyone or at least their uncles and aunts, and make the path clear for these nephews, cousins, school friends' sons. So there are many parallels. While Faulkner never wrote a memoir of his war, he did return to it constantly in his fiction and his (fictionalized) presentations of himself.  Percy did as well, in his poetry, though not so much, and more so in his own memoir,

Lanterns on the Levee.

Picking up Memoirs of A Fox-Hunting Man last week, this time I found it fascinating and finished it in a few nights reading.  The war looms every more largely in the second half, until finally, slowly, o so slowly, the real thing comes, and finally, Sassoon is taken by war, months after he joins up. He loses the men whom he loves, who may well have been his lovers. Whether or not they were physical lovers doesn't matter to us. In any case, the various loves in their various way, were were profound and complete. Finally, the war devours him, ending, for him at least, forever, the very England of the golden days of following the hounds in comaraderie of class, prosperity and family.  The blinders of class and comfort through which Sherston had so happily seen nothing of the world but his own very narrow matters, have been shattered forever, with the shattering of his health and his youth.

The second volume in The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is Memoirs of 

An Infantry Officer, the third, when he's in hospital and treatment for shell shock,

is titled Sherston's Progress.

---------------------

* During the course of the years (beginning in September, 2010) working to create The American Slave Coast, el V and I both used up two computers. We're finishing it, both us on computer 3 -- though yes, both of us initially, began with machines that were unstable in the way computers warn you that necessary replacement looms.

Jane Smiley: Falling In Love Again With England

In this weekend's New York Times's Travel section, Jane Smiley, a novelist whom I've always enjoyed and respected, writes how a guest gig to England's northeast revived her love of England. In her essay," Lost in Time In England's Northeast," she provides an admirable gloss of the region's historical significance as well as its charms and beauties.

The Holy Isle of Lindisfarne

Lindisfarne isn't always accessible

As I'm an enthusiastic audience for the History Channel's Vikings, this part was of particular interest, since Lindisfarne features prominently in the series:

Durham is not much of an international tourism destination, perhaps because Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens and J. K. Rowling are all from elsewhere (though Durham Cathedral did stand in for Hogwarts in the first two Harry Potter movies). Even those paradigmatic northerners, the Brontës, grew up 90 miles to the southwest of Durham. What might get you off the East Coast train before Edinburgh is the lost-in-time peacefulness of the broad landscape and the picturesque homeliness of Durham itself, which was founded in 995 by monks who were carrying the remains of St. Cuthbert, one of England’s first native-born saints, from Lindisfarne to this peninsula safe within the embrace of the looping Wear River. The monks had been carrying the remains off and on for 120 years, doing their best to avoid Viking attacks. Legend has it that when the bier became impossible to lift, the monks happened upon a woman looking for her dun cow, who led them, now miraculously able to lift the bier, to the current site.

Then Smiley gets even better:

On the morning I visited, the Chapel of the Nine Altars, where St. Cuthbert’s remains are buried at the east end of the nave, was filled with sunshine. In a quieter spot at the west end, the Galilee Chapel, was the unexpected (to me) tomb of Bede (672-735), the Anglo-Saxon historian who wrote “An Ecclesiastical History of the English People,” as well as numerous commentaries on the Bible, several saints’ lives and three scientific treatises. My scalp actually tingled as I stood before Bede’s 1,200-year-old remains — most of his contemporary authors, of “Beowulf,” of “The Seafarer,” of “The Dream of the Rood,” are unknown. I felt some Anglophilia coming on. My deep love for English literature has never wavered, and here was its very root.

She could well be describing my own experience -- that is, if I'm ever to be so fortunate as to get to this part of the world.

Spiral horned sheep - Durham region

Sheep of the North

Moreover, this is in the country of Nicola Griffith's Hild, the most immersive fiction experience I've had in years:

The north of England was the site of sustained religious conflict in the seventh and eighth centuries — paganism of a basically Scandinavian model was flourishing; the pope wanted to claim the area, but so did Celtic Christians, who adhered to a different calendar. St. Aidan did convert the population and several important kings, but is said to have chosen Lindisfarne because he did not want his local king to be able to tell him what to do. No ruins of the original priory remain, but as I gazed upon the beautiful red sandstone ruin of a Benedictine priory built around the same time as Durham Cathedral, now roofless, weathered, I felt the ethereal, timeless quiet that St. Aidan must have cherished.

Bede spent his life at St. Paul’s monastery at Jarrow (about 18 miles northeast of Durham). The monastery was built about a generation after Lindisfarne by Benedict, the son of a local noble family who went to Rome and subsequently adhered to the pope’s version of Catholic theology. The stone walls, an advance upon Lindisfarne’s oak and thatch, were built by masons brought in from the Continent. These have been incorporated into the church that stands on the site, and the rough authenticity of the modern church (in a curve of the Don River before it empties into the Tyne) is beautiful and a bit forbidding.

A few hundred feet north of St. Paul’s, across the green, is Bede’s World, a museum devoted to replicating life in the eighth century.... 

However, lest anyone fear that the charms of the northeast are confined to the past, there is Antony Gormley’s “Angel of the North:

The South of England, Cornwall & Wales - Once, Present and ... Future?

Having so much personal experience with catastrophe brought by flood and wind,  I am reading and watching with compassion and distress what this winter's extreme weather is doing in the UK.  It's particularly affecting the south of England, which means some of the oldest areas that we who aren't English but learned to love via literature, fiction and history.  This is King Arthur country, the country of Midsomer Murders, King Alfred, Thomas Hardy's Wessex, Oxfordshire, Stratford-on-Avon among many other other associations that are loved by us in the U.S. as much as in England.  It is beautiful in the way that only land that has been lovingly cultivated and intelligently nurtured, for at least 1500 years can be.  From this part came many of our ancestors to what would eventually become the United States.  You can see much of the same methods of architecture, agriculture and landscaping, and experience the cultural roots in the homes of friends on the Eastern Shore of Maryland even today.

The worst affected -- from what I can tell via news reports, and I do not personally know the geography in the way I do Maryland's for instance --  are the Somerset Levels, which have hosted humanity since at least the Neolithic, which were early drainage projects to expand agriculture and husbandry going back at least to the Roman occupation.

Somerset Levels Seen From Glastonbury Tor

Glastonbury Tor

Somerset Levels Today

What is to be done?  What can be done?

Lord Smith denied making the controversial comment that Britain may have to choose whether it wants to save “town or country” from future flooding because it is too costly to defend both.

He said: “I have never said it is a choice between saving the town and saving the country.

“What I have said is that the clear priorities that have been set for us by successive governments is: our top priority is protecting lives; our second priority is protecting people's homes and people's businesses; our third priority is protecting as much agricultural land as we can.
“That's the order of priority, that happens in both the town and the country.”

The worst storms yet are to hit the region this weekend.  It has been battered by one storm, worse than the preceding one, since the holidays.

The Met Office issued severe weather warnings for the flood-stricken south-west of England but also for London, the south-east and Wales, predicting torrential rain and winds of up to 80mph on Friday night and Saturday, which could cause another wave of power cuts and bring down trees as well as causing inland and coastal flooding.

These are not catastrophes of a single season.  This extreme weather is the new order of things. For all of us living in water-rich lands, in which past drainage, building and paving over are taking a dreadful toll of our preset and future.  Water Meadows were called that for a reason.  Just as right where I live Spring Street is named that for a reason, and the waterfront is five minutes away by foot.

However, for everybody not affected personally:  Let's Go Sochi. rahrahrah.