Checking In From the Blue Ridge Mountains -- Staunton, VA

Stopped off here to see an old friend* (from Lincoln Ctr.'s sponsorship of Rhys Chattham's hundreds guitars piece, for which El V was one of the diredtors), and visit the Woodrow Wilson Pres. Library.

Wilson is the POTUS who officially instituted federal apartheid for any federal work was born here, though early  his life his Slavery rahrahah Secession minister father moved them to Georgia . . . .

So many places and people, so much history, in so few days.

In the meantime, there's this from Publisher's Publicist:

The American Slave Coast (9781613748206) was referenced and quoted from in an article by Malcolm Harris posted to The New Republic on 4/27/16.

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*  This friend, met while he volunteered and spent some weeks in NYC to rehearse the piece (in el Vs section) also creates the acoustic spectrum tracking hardware and software of planets and stars for the great astronomical telescopes such as Hubble. He love music and particularly guitars.  He also repaired el V's dead vacuum tubes for his classic Fender amp.

Visions of Science: Books and Readers at he Dawn of the Victorian Age by James Secord

Visions of Science reviewed here, "The March of Intellect" by Rosemary Hill, in the UK Guardian, has provoked thinking again about the parallels of events and ideas in England, particularly, Europe generally, and the New World, the North American colonies and the United States particularly.

The March Of Intellect, portrayed in a cartoon of 1828 as a giant steam-driven robot sweeping away the established order, was changing everything for better, or for worse.

1828 – here in the U.S. we are now the Age of Jackson, partially thanks to “the Press”; when we, over here, think in terms of the Age of Jackson, the final destruction of the Federalist party, universal franchise (for white men), Indian Removal, Jackson' economic ignorance bringing on one of the longest and worst financial disasters in our history, the inflating bubble of the domestic slave trade and the growth of secessionist "philosophy".  Yet, all these other ideas and discussions were going on in the minds of men and women too, as much in the adolescent U.S. as in the far more mature England.

This makes me shiver – as quoted from the review, again, the advances in printing made these ideas more available to more people. It was as much in effect here in the U.S. in the era of raging populism (playing a huge role in the election of Andre Jackson to the Presidency),

as it was for a highly educated, developed, brilliant intellects as George Eliot (then  Mary Ann Evans) and her to-be common law partner, George Henry Lewes, and her intellectual sparring partner to-be, Herbert Spencer.  All of them were enthralled by Lyell’s thinking.

.... What may now look like "the dawn of the Victorian age", as James Secord's subtitle has it, was to contemporaries an era all of its own in which The March of Intellect, portrayed in a cartoon of 1828 as a giant steam-driven robot sweeping away the established order, was changing everything for better, or for worse.

The new steam-powered printing presses brought cheap reading matter to ever larger audiences and among the books available to buy or borrow were the founding texts of subjects from psychology to physics. ....

.... If one question preoccupied the thinking classes of the 1830s more than another it was time. Newton had long since opened up space, but time remained trapped in biblical chronology, which reckoned the Earth to be about 6,000 years old. It was increasingly clear that this was not enough to account even for human history, but evidence for an alternative theory was slow in coming.

It emerged from one of the newer sciences when the first part of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology was published in 1831. Lyell's theories about the formation of the earth broke the time barrier and his book, Darwin found, "altered the tone of one's mind". Many minds were altered in due course, but as Secord makes clear the process was gradual and the alterations various. For some people it meant the end of God. The atheist Charles Southwell sent for Lyell's Principles when he was in prison for blasphemy. Yet many contemporaries read it as a way of reconciling the material evidence of the fossil record with the slow unfolding of a divine plan.

The mysteries of time, even documented, historical era parallels, are still here, to be investigated and marveled at, part of the history of ideas.

The Book of Life - Deborah Harkness Concludes the All Souls Trilogy

Viking will release the conclusion to Deborah Harkness's All Souls Trilogy this summer, July 15, 2014, The Book of Life.

The Book of Life, the conclusion to Harkness's All Souls Trilogy will be available from Viking, July 15, 2014

An exclusive teaser excerpt has been put up online by Lindsay Deutsch.  It is available to be read here.

I am assuming that the book of the title is a physical book, the living properties of which were beginning to be explored by the principal characters, witch Diana Bishop and her vampire husband, Matthew Clairmont, as Shadow of Night concluded.

Like the previous novels' other many readers are doing, more or less patiently, I am greatly looking forward to the publication of The Book of Life. I'm particularly interested in which historical eras they will explore in The Book of Life. As an historian who has also written adult historical fantasy (though sexual attraction, romance and marriage -- and wine -- are very important in Harkness's novels, they are neither Romances nor Young Adult books), the historical geographies and cultures of the books are intensely appealing.

Beyond enjoyment in the historical and adventure aspects, I'm impatient for more of the philosophical and genetic mysteries of time and life that our characters are puzzling over, which for them are literally matters of life and death. Even better, it appears The Book of Life will be the conclusion of all these matters -- the whole story told in three volumes, an actual trilogy, as opposed to an open-ended series.

A Discovery of Witches (2011)

An extensive post discussing A Discovery of Witches can be read here. (Fair Warning: depending on taste for reading content on screen, this could be classified by those who don't have the taste to do so as TL;DR.)

Shadow of Night (2012)

Neda Ulaby, NPR's reporter on arts, entertainment and culture, did a feature on Shadow of Night in the summer of 2012.  I had the privilege of contributing a few words.  You can hear or read the piece here.

Deborah Harkness

The publications of Harkness, professor of history at the University of Southern California, include two non-fiction studies in the history of science:

 - John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. 1999.

- The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2007

Dracula - NBC

I enjoyed last week's premiere of Dracula a great deal more than I expected to.  I enjoyed it enough to look forward to the next episode. Evidently, I am not the only one to be pleasantly surprised.

It's too bad that the attraction is not in the actor, who, as Dracula, is the center of the series, Jonathan Rhys Meyers.  Being Stoker's Dracula, by definition then, evil, perhaps we don't want Dracula to be appealing?  So far, as Meyers projects him -- that slicked flat hair, the signature Meyers' hooded eyes, facial ornaments, Dracula seems more like one of those stereotypical oily latin lovers or latin villains of which the early decades of the 20th century were enamored on stage and screen.

So wherein does the appeal lie?  Perhaps in some of what captured my support in the later episodes of Ripper Street* -- a sense of a society on the move, embarked on rapid change, and excited by these changes, not intimidated by them, or jaded by them.  This is a society that does not yet even imagine WWI and is tremendously excited by electricity.  This can perhaps be described in that now convenient catch-all term, steampunk, in which bounds of European Empires, we pale folks -- and who is more pale than a vampire? -- can safely celebrate.  But like Ripper Street, the divisions of class and corruption, poverty and crime, the persistence of these matters' threats to the comfortable segments of society, are all present, if foregrounded more in the metaphor of vampirism and ancient secret societies, whose underground wars with each other are also played out in front of the eyes of the overground population -- those whose eyes are open enough to see them, anyway.

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*  Ripper Street's second season began this last week on UK television.  I loved the opening of the review for it in The Guardian, here:

According to the rules of television, there are only three characters capable of driving a plot in Victorian London: prostitutes, murderers and murdered prostitutes.

About which very thing last spring I fulminated here, and here too.

Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to Ripper Street's second season, particularly since the Guardian review stated that this time out it seems no prostitutes were murdered in the course of our entertainment.

BBC: Making of Europe Unlocked by DNA

The story's written by Paul Rincon, on the BBC Science  News "page."

A study of remains from Central Europe suggests the foundations of the modern gene pool were laid down between 4,000 and 2,000 BC - in Neolithic times. ....

"What is intriguing is that the genetic markers of this first pan-European culture, which was clearly very successful, were then suddenly replaced around 4,500 years ago, and we don't know why. 

"Something major happened, and the hunt is now on to find out what that was."

Narrative Power: Encounters, Celebrations, Struggles edited by L. Timmel Duchamp

Aqueduct Press (03/15/2010).

I want this book.

Adults, as a rule, also like to hear the same stories, although they prefer that the stories have some differences – the human brain loves to detect differences. The popularity of familiar stories that reinforce the status quo is not limited to television and popular literature: historians repeat themselves.

Horatio-Alger stories thus become the narrative for male public figures who rise to success from poverty; for women, the story is more problematic, because female public figures are anomalous. In either case, the politics of the narrator inform the story being told. In narratives about women, as Joanna Russ has pointed out in her classic How to Suppress Women’s Writing, the narrator may simply deny that the woman actually accomplished anything worth noting. —from Eileen Gunn's introduction* to Narrative Power __

It is commonly said that history is written by the victors: the narrator chooses the events that will be part of the story, and the narrative explains their meaning. In fiction, narrative conventions and clichés make writing and reading familiar stories easier, but also impede writers’ efforts to tell unfamiliar stories. This volume asks: Is narrative inherently dangerous? Empowering? Or even liberating? A mix of established and new writers join several scholars in considering the politics of narrative manifested in fiction, history, and science.

Table of Contents
1. Going to Narrative: Introduction by Eileen Gunn
Part I. Narrative and History
2. Carolyn Ives Gilman, “Telling Reality: Why Narrative Fails Us”
3. L. Timmel Duchamp, “Lost in the Archives: A Shattered Romance”
4. Ellen E. Kittell, “Patriarchal Imperialism and the Narrative of Women’s History”
5. Rebecca Wanzo, “The Era of Lost (White) Girls: On Body and Event”
Part II. Narrative Politics
6. Lesley A. Hall, “Beyond Madame Curie? The Invisibility of Women’s Narratives in Science”
7. Wendy Walker, “Imagination and Prison”
8. Lance Olsen, “Against Accessibility: Renewing the Difficult Imagination”
9. Alan DeNiro, “Reading The Best of A.E. Van Vogt”
10. Andrea Hairston, “Stories Are More Important Than Facts: Imagination as Resistance in Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth”
11. Susan Palwick, “Suspending Disbelief: Story as a Political Catalyst”
12. Rebecca Wanzo, “Apocalyptic Empathy: A Parable of Postmodern Sentimentality”
Part III. Narrative and Writing Fiction
13. Samuel R. Delany, “The Life of/and Writing”
14. Nicola Griffith, “Living Fiction and Storybook Lives”
15. Eleanor Arnason, “Narrative and Class”
16. Rachel Swirksy, “Why We Tell the Story”
17. Claire Light, “Girl in Landscape: How to Fall into a Politically Useless Narrative Rut and Notions of How to Get Back Out”

This book sounds essential, as well as fascinating. I've been thinking particularly, lately, of the area of narratives and women as discussed in the TOC #6, "Beyond Madame Curie? The Invisibility of Women’s Narratives in Science.”

This has been provoked by reading Richard Holmes's The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009).* Among the figures given a great deal of text in what the author himself declares a 'narrative' history, is Caroline Herschel, the 'comet sweeper,' sister of one of the founders of modern astronomy, William Herschel.

Caroline's early story, in the bosom of a denying, cold family, who, with the exception this brother, evidently chose her to be the in-house slave and scrub, makes one's heart sore. Particularly, considering how many Caroline Herschels there had to have been, who didn't have the eventual comfort and rescue by a loving brother.
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* Which is a most fortunate fiction - non-fiction pairing with my endless audio book listening that is Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series. O'Brian wrote a well-received biography of the 18th century natural philosophy and botonist, Joseph Banks, who is also featured in Holmes's The Age of Wonder -- Joseph Banks: A Life (1987).