The Mothers of English Historical Novels - Plus Fèt Gede

     . . . .  Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontë by Devoney Looser (2022).

Washington Post review here, which upon reading the review, I immediately ordered the biography. These Porter sister novelists were the mothers of English historical fiction. I have often invoked Sir Walter Scott as the father of historical fiction (and Dumas as godfather), but as deep as my knowledge of English literary history is, I'd no idea these women had existed.  Can we guess why, one wonders . . . .

 Maria and Jane Porter published the first Brit historical fiction in novel form in several books in the first decade of the 19th century.  

Delaware Art Museum 

Book cover design for Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter

ATTRIBUTED TO: Walter Stewart (American illustrator and painter, 1902–1981) 

Maria Porter, in her 1803 Thaddeus of Warsaw, created

... “the historical novel as we know it” in her 1803 tale of a Polish war hero who becomes a refugee in England. “What was new about ‘Thaddeus of Warsaw,’ ” Looser explains, “was its mingling of climactic historical events with the conventions of biographies, romantic tales, and probable domestic novels.” Contemporary critics dubbed it “a work of genius,” and it was a sensational bestseller. ....

ANTIQUE (1810) FIRST-EDITION HARDCOVER BOOK THE SCOTTISH CHIEFS. JANE PORTER. FRANKLIN EDITION. PUBLISHED PRINTED ENGLAND BY WORTHINGTON

In 1810 Jane Porter published The Scottish Chiefs, telling the tale of William Wallace’s battle for Scottish independence from Britain, published quite prior to Scott’s first novel, Waverly, 1814, that told of of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. 

These two sisters’ novels were massive hits, best sellers, out of the box. Would that have had any influence on Scott’s literary choice of form and subject?  One commentator to the review observed,

 "I find it interesting that of the twenty-six ‘Waverley novels’ written by Walter Scott not one was set during the time of William Wallace and King Robert I." 

Author Looser did address this -- how could she, how can we, not?

... [Looser] is more cogent on the question of why these popular and influential authors are virtually unknown today. The root cause of the sisters’ decline in literary reputation and, eventually, sales, Looser writes, was the phenomenal success of Walter Scott’s “Waverley” in 1814 and the author’s failure to acknowledge that the methods he employed in his historical novels were very similar to the Porters’: “Critics would increasingly claim that the Waverley novels had elevated the genre of fiction — and especially historical fiction — bringing to it a superior new (masculine) excellence, while correcting supposed previous (feminine) faults.”

Are we surprised yet?

.... Jane in particular resented this and in 1827 wrote a pointed short story, “Nobody’s Address,” that implicitly accused Scott of reducing his literary precursors to nobodies. By the time she died in 1850, having survived Maria by 18 years, Jane had been reduced to living with a brother and receiving charitable grants from the government. Her achievements deserved better recognition, and although Looser’s thickly detailed biography could stand to be a little less detailed, it pays overdue tribute to pioneering siblings unjustly neglected by literary history. ....

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     . . . . A perfect day -- gold, red and blue -- so clear and still, low humidity for a change, and the temperature in the seasonal 50's. Receiving audio royalties for The Books, was a good start to the day. However,  packed restaurants, streets and sidewalks. The annual Village Halloween Parade cattle stanchions are unloaded and going up too, for Monday, further blocking access to sidewalks and intersections.  Getting around down here is nearly impossible; I had to fight my way through the outsiders to my polling place. This is the first day of early voting in the Midterm election.  Alas there was so little, were so few, to vote for; mostly I was voting against. 

Weep for the city, weep for the state, weep for the nation, weep for the world. 

However, after Monday's Hell Night, Tuesday night, known in some places as El dia de los muertos and others as the Day of the Dead, in Haiti is Festival of the Dead,  Postmambo's Fèt Gede*, will zoom throughout the US and Europe.  This is the third year Postmambo is hosting a Gede festival: 

Postmambo Movie Night

presents

Fèt Gede in Weimar America

Tuesday, Nov. 1, 7 pm eastern

note earlier-than-usual start time

We'll warm up with some Haitian music videos, including some of my all-time favorites, namely RAM's videos featuring Gede, lwa of the dead. Including their new one, "Gede Vim Anwo." Mr. RAM himself, Richard A. Morse, has indicated that he will be able to drop in and talk to us from his pied-a-terre in New Orleans, where RAM is presently rehearsing and gigging, about these awe-inspiring videos.

==> Our main feature will be Maya Deren's Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, shot between 1947 and 1954. We'll talk about it afterwards with my fave co-host, Dr. Elizabeth McAlister. (Revisit her January 2022 Postmambo Session on "Funerary Rites in Haitian Vodou" here.)

==> More guests to be announced, including an instructor in Gede dancing . . . Drop in for Fèt Gede / All Saints Day / Day of the Dead / at whatever time you can make it on Tuesday Nov. 1, starting at 7 eastern and continuing until 11 or so. More info to come.

I'll be sending the Zoom link out to this list on Tuesday at 5 p.m. eastern . . .

Get your purple, black and white, your single-lensed shades and black bowler hat, and be your own Gede self. 

* Fèt Gede is naturally huge in New Orleans, as well as Haiti and eastern Cuba.  The Morse and Ram's pied-à-terre there is so important, not only for the cross-aculturation going on between them and the city's indigenous vodun population and musicians and Head, but because Haiti is so very very dangerous -- no exaggeration to say Haiti is very dangerous -- for everyone, on so many fronts from the second invasion of cholera, lack of water and food, drugs, gang and 'government' violence -- climate change.  You name it, it's there in the perfect storm of calamity that has come to this nation, thanks to relentless, historical, racist politics on the part of the US and Europe.

Balzac: Fiction Needs Facts, Fiction Needs History, All Fiction Does

      . . . . The 19th C French novelists are a primary resource for thinking about writing/composing both fiction and history.  Balzac and Dumas are both particularly useful. But Dumas was nearly entirely concerned with the history of France provided in the pages of overt fiction. Balzac, however, thought constantly of the relationship of not just historical fiction to history, but the necessity of historical facts and verisimilitude to other fictional forms, particularly those forms we in the US, in this time, loosely call the realist novel, the novel of manners, and, the fiction of the fantastic.

Balzac came up a ‘system’ novel for the literature of realism – which term didn’t yet exist in his time – but was called by the 1820’s French Romantic painters, la couleur locale, and Balzac expanded to la couleur historique.

In describing that attempt, Balzac speaks of local color; in relation to the fiction of the period, his la couleur historique — is indeed more precise. For Balzac as for his contemporaries, truth could most easily be found in the history and expressed in literature with an historical setting: 

"Lit le roman historiques sont l'expression de la France et de la lit au XIXe siecle" (review of H. de Latouche, Fragoletta, 1829). He was to foreshadow Augustin Thierry's opinion, that history would impact nineteenth century fiction, as the young Romantics had experienced a violent reintegration into history, as a result of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. The example of Sir Walter Scott merely gave a specifically literary dimension to an already intense fascination with history and historical change; and Scott would of course be Balzac's ideal for the whole of his mature literary career. His early aim was that of Scott and of Scott's other disciples, to reconstruct "l'esprit d'une epoque et d'un fait," to make popular the study of history through a form less boring perhaps than the scholarly essays inspired by la Clio classique. 

Even at this early stage, however, Balzac seems to call for a greater degree of truth than do many of his contemporaries. For him, historical fact was to serve as more than a mere springboard for the poetic imagination. He could say that the historical novel should not aspire to the rigorous veracity of scholarly history, that historical figures should have a peripheral role in what is after all a work of fiction. He criticized Vigny for having used history to his own ends:

avait vu quelques scenes poetiques, et il les avait Verite, pour nous convaincre que les artistes viven qu'il s'agit bien moins de mettre le vrai dans le fau le vrai" (review of M. James, Richelieu, 1830).

 Balzac, as he expressed it ten years later, was the exact opposite of literary truth which Vigny developed in his preface to Reflexions sur la verite dans l'art: "L'art du roman vrai dans tous les details, quand son personnage es la litterature, I, 1840).

Even Balzac's excursions into fantastique practiced by Ε. T. A. Hoffmann are dose of reality. The authenticity of details is a point many times in the articles and prefaces he wrote. A realist may deal in fiction, but he must never relinquish fact, "l'immense verite des details." Balzac's rapid abandonment of the historical and fantastique may well be explained by his judgment of  Indiana (1832)*:

 "Ce livre-la est une reaction de la verite contre le fantastique, du temps present contre le moyen-äge, du drame intime contre la bizarrerie des incidents ä la mode, de l'actualite simple contre l'exageration du genre historique."

What had originally been a quest for truth, an imitation of nature, had rapidly become the vehicle for the greatest excesses of the literary imagination. The public had grown tired, Balzac wrote in the preface to La Peau de chagrin (1831), his first important work with a contemporary setting, of "l'histoire de France." Les Chouans appeared in 1829, which also saw the publication of Merimee's Chronique du regne de Charles IX; only two years later Balzac followed his elder, Stendhal, in writing a chronique du XIXe siecle. ....

... the matter might change; the method had not.  The recreation of the past which is the task of the historian would  always remain for Balzac the most adequate analogy to the novelist's undertaking. He intended to write "l'histoire oubliee par tant  toriens, celle des moeurs." Charles Nodier had defined the novelist as historien de moeurs as early as 1817; for Balzac the term became a constant point of reference. He repeatedly proclaimed himself an historian of manners and morals, "plus historien que romancier"; he referrs to his work as "cette longue histoire des moeurs modernes mises en act. He claimed merely to be an humble copyist, the secretary of his society as he said novelists had always been. The gift he prized above addition to the ability to give artistic form to what one had to say, was the accurate observation of reality, which made the roman de mores a more difficult genre than the historical novel. The Balzacian notion of contemporary mores demands "des connaissances presque techniq tandis qu'un roman historique ne veut que la science, des recher et de la lecture". ....

- - - - Balzac's Theory of the Novel / Maurice Z. Shroder / L'Esprit Créateur / Vol. 7, No. 1, Honoré de Balzac (Spring 1967), pp. 3-10 (8 pages) / Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press / https://www-jstor-org.i.ezproxy.nypl.org/stable/26277449?

To see why Balzac believed it was more difficult to give artistic form to novels which are histoire des moeurs modernes mises en act -- the novels of contemporary manners -- one of his own works will provide an example. The subject of Illusians perdues (Lost Illusions) is a young man who burns to write literature, who has a decent gift, and the business of writing and publishing.

For those of us in the US, thinking of our own history and fiction that is inspired by our history, our own locale couleur and  locale historique, our National Archives (much available via online portal)  is and excellent resource.

When I'm asked what are the most important tools for writing good historical fiction, I always respond there are five.

1) voracious reading of the respected historians and fiction writers too -- and particularly those who wrote contemporary history of the period in which one's tale and characters are made;

2) Read the newspapers of the period -- that is, if your period had newspapers, but it will have some source of news, if only the local gossips. Indeed, George Eliot made brilliant use of these in Middlemarch, set several decades before she wrote it, though newspapers not only proliferated in that period already, and, indeed, a fictional newspaper is part of the fiction too; [Indeed, Laidislaw goes from his ambition to be a fine artist to working in newspapers and politics -- another case of literature's Illusions perdues!]

3) Look at the arts created in the period -- this includes listening to the music of the time, even though recording wasn't yet invented, probably, one may still learn something important, since making music played a role in so many lives, that speaks to class, and even to politics of those alive at the time;

4) Spend a lot of time with and the National Archives, and with JSTOR, generally now, since pandemic, available to you at home instead of needing to be at your local library, haunt the historical societies and museums of the place;

5) Go to the places one's characters go (which, as we see above, George Sand had not done).

* 

A novel by George Sand, published in 1832:

Indiana is a novel about love and marriage written by Amantine Aurore Dupin; it was the first work she published under her pseudonym George Sand. Published in April 1832, the novel blends the conventions of romanticism, realism and idealism. As the novel is set partly in France and partly in the French colony of Réunion, Sand had to base her descriptions of the colony, where she had never been, on the travel writing of her friend Jules Néraud.

If one has slogged through Indiana, as I have, one sees indeed how Balzac came to the conclusion that it was far more difficult to write fiction as convincing art for a novel of manners than for historical fiction

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In the meantime, things continue to roll along.  So much to do, so many places to go in the service of the doing -- please, please, please let neither of us contract covid.

The Heat Storm is reaching us today.  My concern goes out to our family and friends in West and the Southwest, and now the Middle West too.

The Dark Ages On Three Kings Day

     . . . . Today is Three Kings Day, the day which begins the count down to Mardi Gras. 

In Roman Catholic countries, and here, in New Orleans, we eat King Cake.  We have some, from Mille Feuille, our local French bakery -- which makes all the very best of everything that it makes.  It feels all the more important to observe King's Day since, for a very long time, 01/6/21 will be thought of on this date, in the USA  

Mardi Gras's comin', BAAAAAAAAAABEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! Doncha fergit it!

In the meantime, even in the Dark Ages, surely, at least in the monasteries, Three Kings Day a/ka/ Epiphany was observed.
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     . . . . A long time ago, 1938 in fact, Robert Graves, who made the Empress Livia live forever, thanks to his character of Emperor Claudius, the BBC, and actor Derek Jacobi, way back in 1972, published an historical novel of another age, a different Roman Empire, a newish religious era, titled Count Belisarius.

For newcomers to these names, Commander Belisarius is an historically lauded general of the 6th C -- 505 - 565. He was part of the times that historians have called Europe's "Dark Ages." This is the century that has been the favorite chronological location for Britain's King Arthur.

Looking through this so readable novel, it differs in so much from what the current historians of his time and actions I've been reading for the last ten years.  This was another effective military commander badly treated by a fearful, jealous Byzantine emperor. But even so, Graves seems to be wrong, deliberately or otherwise, about much of even the small, basic stuff we do know about the Commander.  For one thing, Graves has chosen, according to himself, to present this story as a Legend, a Romance in the mode of the Arthurian cycles as written in the Medieval period.  Partly that is due to Graves depending on Procopius as his major source -- as do all, of course, including respectable historians -- but Procopius is infamous for all the axes he grinds in his Secret History, his prejudices, his personal antagonisms, his conscious pay-back and sheer malicious joy in blackening reputations. Though he loved Belisarius, oooo how he hated the Empress Theodora!

Unlike Graves's two Claudian novels, which I've read several times, this is a first read of Count Belisarius. I'm starting to think  Gore Vidal's Julian (the Apostate) - 1964, and Robert Harris's Cicero Trilogy, were influenced by this earlier book, particularly with Vidal's structure, and Harris's choice for narrator.

It's been a bright spot in these damned Omicron-coupled-with-insane politico clowns weeks, to feel I've finally gotten something of a handle on the Gothic, Vandal and Hunnic wars of the 5th century, and some of the 6th century, for both the western and the eastern empires (which, by the end of the 5th century, the western empire was in the agony that transformed it into the states that became Europe). 

I'm really understanding why it is so many archaeologists and historians warn, "Be grateful you were not born in the 6th , 7th -- a century that brought Bubonic Plague to Constantinople and Europe, among all the other ordeals and horrors -- and 8th centuries -- though honestly, for So Many, the 5th and 9th + centuries don't look all that good either. At least in the 9th century Europe got Charlemagne and his dreams of a unity Christendom (he failed, as Christianity and all religions fail at that sort of unity), culture, civilization and knowledge.

I'm trying to get a firmer grip on the Goths in the Danubian lands, Italy, Africa, Gaul and Iberia prior to the Arab explosion in the 7th century. So dark, the written information so scarce -- and all of it biased as heck

I do not think I shall ever get even a slippery grip on the Persians -- there were so many iterations of the Persians, starting so far back, and going on for many eras.  So very very VERY many eras. To this day so many in Iran speak Farsi-Persian, as well as speakers of Dari Persian throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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Looking at the stat NYC covid map: there are large parts of the boroughs that are more than 50% infected -- or just positive?  They don't tell us that. Our nation hit 1,000,000 new cases today.  Yes.  One MILLION. So, we are not at all out and about these days. 

Plus. it's cold here.

Though not as frigid as it will be the weekend, and this weekend won't be as frigid as next week.  Tomorrow morning we have Maybe Snow. Tonight we're doing serious comfort food for dinner.

Some hearty red Spanish wine.    

It's A Mystery, Yet Not A Crime!

      . . . . Who knows why I haven't  posted in two months?  I don't.  However, unlike this one, there are many mysteries and crimes that are engaging and entertaining.

The Word Is Murder (2017); The Sentence Is Death (2018); A Line To Kill (2021)

This is good, O, very good -- Anthony Horowitz has a series, three so far, which is consciously rather Watson and Sherlock in the present day, so it's Hawthorne and ... ta-Dah! Horowitz.  

This should not work, it should be insufferable at the very least, as character wingman, Horowitz, is portrayed by himself, the writer, as himself, a fabulously successful television writer and writer of novels. Got that?

Horowitz the author doesn't describe himself as character Horowitz as wildly successful, though Horowitz the character does refers frequently to his own / Horowitz the author's works, wildly popular television series such as Foyle's War and Midsomer Murders, to not quite as successful novel, The Silk Road (one of his novels featuring Sherlock Holmes), to the wildly popular Alex Rider YA series -- which became also a wildly successful television series.

Here equally are references to detective and crime fiction by many other writers, past and present. 

One guesses then, this is why this series works, The references to Horowitz's own and others' fictions and television programs is about what is operationally effective in these works, in terms of character, plot, what audiences want, expect and like in a crime and mystery, whether fiction or ‘true crime’. Not least audiences want appealing, interesting locations, or least a milieu which the audience isn’t likely to inhabit itself. An example would be the stews of Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh Rebus series. 

So, in A Line To Kill, we are on the Channel Island of Alderney, picturesque but certainly a distance from a reader like myself, who, previous to such crime series, only sense of the Channel Islands -- Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney -- was these are breeds of dairy cattle common even in the USA. Nor more did we know anything about other island groups that are part of the UK, such as the Shetland Islands. But that has changed, due to crime fiction and teleision.

Within author Horowitz's novel, the author and character draw our attention to what author Horowitz knows we know, such as Ann Cleeves's Perez novels set on Shetland Isles, both wildly successful as novels, and a very successful television series. But even more so for A Line To Kill, for instance, there are references to an older, but also very successful television series, Bergerac, which takes place on Alderney’s neighboring island of Jersey. Then, to convolute even more so (beware writers looking to have fun with their own work!), Bergerac’s title character is played by the young John Nettles, who portrays Chief Inspector Barnaby in the television series Midsomer Murders, which may be the most popular scripted crime drama on British television, for which author Horowitz -- and character Horowitz, have written many of the scripts. How meta can we get? 

Yet! Beyond even that, Alderney has hundreds of nazi built fortifications and other WWII left overs from the nazi occupation, including mass grave sites from the four labor camps, thus character Horowitz thinks of the not as wildly successful television series in the UK, but much more liked in the US, Island At War (in which, let us not forget, how perfectly Lawrence Fox played a callow nazi officer ....). 

One of those nazi era Alderney artifacts plays a part in the plot.

These observations by character Horowitz, are always in the context of what Investigator Hawthorn is doing or not doing, or not telling, character Horowitz, etc., and the emotional and professional cost this is to the character writer/narrator, who is supposed to portray this up-and-coming famous, infallible detective. These observations contribute to the portrayal of the writer's character as writer, whose job it is to be a writer / novelist, at least of the sort of writer author/character Horowitz is.

First and foremost, despite whatever joy of inspiration may or may not manifest now and again, this is a job of work, and often, not that pleasant.  It's even more of a slog when this latest project is utterly adored by his publishers and readers who want more More MORE of it (see: Agatha Christie and Poirot, or even Doyle and Sherlock).  These days character Horowitz's job is shadowing Private Investigator Hawthorne on a case and then writing it up the case’s investigation as a book targeted to mass audience.  Which is the job that author Horowitz has given to character Horowitz, yes?

These books are a hoot, their cleverness quite entertaining, and no more taxing to the brain than watching Midsomer Murders, which Horowitz the author made into one of the most successful television programs of all time. Again, here we have a wildly successful set of novels, by Carolyn Graham, turned into a wildly successful television series, author shouted out by character Horowitz. 

I wish to give further credit to Horowitz: these are books I'd recommend to anyone who wants to write genre fiction of any sort.  Horowitz illustrates, without telling us, that one must study, really study, the masters, past and present, to know what one is doing. In no genre is it more fundamental than in crime and mystery to know the genre is which one is writing, and understand every nut and bolt of fabrication, why it is there, how it got there, and how it fits with all the other nuts and bolts. This leads to the understanding that the writer must also know a vast deal more than even this, to construct a satisfying work of crime and mystery.  This is particularly so for mystery writers who wish a career in writing crime and mystery for television.

So, well, maybe these books aren't for everyone, but they sure do work for me. Ha!

P.S. for another wildly successful crime / mystery series, which is also a wildly successful television series --  see: Andrea Camilleri's Comisario Montalbano series. In fact, it's in fact two television series, including the non-novel prequel series spun off, Young Montalbano.

This year, Camilleri died of being 87 years old. Camilleri had squirreled away a manuscript of what was to be the final novel in the series, to be published only after he died. I have just read this novel, Riccardino (2021), #28 in the Inspector Montalbano series.

By sheer coincidence, in Riccardino, character Montalbano in the novel has also had a television show made from his life and cases by 'The Author', who presumably is Camilleri. Novel Montalbano seeks to escape the direction of both The Author and the television series Montalbano, i.e. the created character is intent on out-smarting the creator of the television version of himself the character, and The Author of the television version. But whereas Horowitz's Horowitzs refer to other crime series and protagonist such Christie's Poirot, or Rankin's Rebus, Camilleri/Montalbano references, among others, Pirandello’s play, Six Characters In Search of An Author.  This had many previously ardent Montalbano readers feeling betrayed and disappointed . . . .  In many ways Riccardino leads one to think this is how Camilleri handled his resentment of a character and series that too many, from his publisher, to his family's inheritance, to his readers and watchers, would not allow him to leave behind and move on. Again, see: Christie and Doyle!

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     . . . . NYC got Omicron for Christmas, shutting us down within three day at the start of Christmas week, so, no, we hadn't a Merry Christmas.  But we did have a sweet, lovely and loving one.  Also a delicious one. It's been fairly wintery too -- with days like today, where we stay right in the mid 30's, even, possibly, a bit of snow flurry. Any snow in our era of  Climate Catastrophe -- which gave us more and longer strings of days more spectacularly beautiful than ever experienced living here -- would be a bit of Holiday miracle. Who knows?  Not I!

Martin Walker's The Coldest Case: A Short, Sort Of Book Review

 

Walker, Martin (2021) The Coldest Case: A Bruno, Chief of Police Novel. The latest installment.

Walker recently won a French literary prize for representation of Southern France and culture to the world.'

I have an additional affection for Walker’s series now too.  I introduced these books to M, back in the summer of 2020.  They helped distract her from the ordeal of cancer tests and treatments, when it was possible to be distracted still, without morphine. She died last month.  I wish she'd been able to read this latest Bruno.

Areas near the French city of Marseille have been hit by a series of wildfires, burning homes and forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents.

I'd expected the next installment of the Brunos would deal with the pandemic as central to Provencal milieu. But it's the wildfire-drought summer of 2016 - 2017 - 2018 - 2019, or maybe even 2020?  Which year it is, is not specified, but it could be any one of them, or even this summer, except of course the book was going through its production process then. However, since there's no reference to previous drought and wildfire summers, this reader assumes 2016.* There are many references to the dangers to the Dordogne in particular, and the series of caves filled with prehistoric paintings, of which Lescaux is only the most famous, though may be not the most important. Which again suggests 2016, because, though wildfires were not unusual in this region in the summers previous to 2016, the extent of the burning and length of time they burned, was new.  Now, like in California, this is the norm.

Castelnaud-la-Chapelle village with Château de Castelnaud castle, Dordogne, Perigord noir, France

The locals – Bruno’s idea of course – employ (a castle that exists in reality) Château de Castelnaud’s re-created trebuchets throughout a set-piece’s endless night to hurl tonnages of ice and water into the advancing conflagration's front lines, retarding it long enough for France’s military fire-fighting planes to be able to fly (so low they have to go, it’s too dangerous at night in the mountains) and spray water on the front – and, not incidentally, as the series is all about the local,** save the castle.

Holy cow!  A litter of puppies are born!

Plus, for the murder mystery, and the historical elements of the Brunos’ formulae, Stasi surveillance documents and trained East German infiltrators from the 1980’s are central.

There's an attempted rape upon a young doctoral archaeologist by a gendarme, which rape is extraneous to all of the story lines, so the reader wonders if a gendarme assaulted a friend of the author? Or else, since she's essential to the solution of the local mystery, but never gets any page time, or time to spend with the local interlocked powers that be/friends, which is lamented several times by Bruno -- this is how author gives her some recognition? Balzac the Bassett's first sired litter of puppies get much more attention than this young archaeologist. Constant attention in fact, even though nobody’s seen them except on Bruno’s fone. Everyone cares about the puppies. Sadly then, we understand this way just what an Outsider she is to this local influencer network intersecting with others of their ilks throughout France in the police, military, media, education, politics, finance, medicine and law (hmm what does it mean that the Church isn't represented in this group?) -- just as it has been at least since the Renaissance. Nobody cares about the young archaeologist Nobody, unconnected to Somebodies. But they do feel vaguely guilty about it, since the author does.   (How much book are we willing make, if this character recurs down the line, as so many do, it will turn out she's the niece of Somebody?)

On the other hand – puppies! And all our recurring characters, as do we readers, know Balzac since he was a pup, and love him well, while nobody knows the archaeologist, including we the readers. Local social circle-hierarchies are cruel as families to those who aren't really part of them.

This means, though, I can still look forward to a Pandemic in Provence Bruno. Or Pandemic and wildfires in Provence, just like 2020 and 2021.

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  *    We were there in Provence between those of 2017 and 2018.  Wolves had been seen for the first time in decades, if not centuries, in the mountains of our friends' village.  I asked then if it were possible the wildfires had sent them to the region, but no one knew.

**  Which makes this series part of the mysteries classified as "cosies", one supposes?  That this is so contributes no little to its success, one further supposes, as the thriller aspects of the larger plots are often not plausible if one looks at them for one second.

Books, History, Asparagus, etc.

      . . . . Downloaded a really well done PDF of Owen Wister's Roosevelt: Portrait of a Friendship 1880 - 1919 (1930).  I can cut and paste out of it for the essay I'm working on, of the Gilded Age's boys who wouldn't grow up -- yet ran everything.  So like today.

Theodore Roosevelt, sophomore at Harvard

Even more so this time around reading Wister's book, the arrogant, casual white supremacy, bigotry, sexism leap out. 

Here we are, regarding the 'modern woman' already on page 10 -- recall the text proper doesn't start until page 4.

"Roosevelt’s mind was a great deal cleaner than the modern lip-stick girl." 

Quickly followed on page 14, in the context of their class's Hasty Pudding club theatricals, Ivanhoe as a musical production. This isn't the fault of Sir Walter Scott.

 "...Ellis Island had not yet diluted Harvard and imported Broadway into the college-spirit of our shows. Next day, the fame of Ivanhoe was all over Boston, and spread to New York."  

This is a dig at Jewish, Irish and Italian immigrants' own theaters, productions, writers and performers, that were very popular with 'proper' Americans too -- thus to Broadway.

One can never forget that Wister's grandfather was Pierce Butler, the largest slave holder in the south, before his bankruptcy that sent all the human property he owned to auction to clear his debts.

Fanny Kemble

His grandmother,  Fanny Kemble was a different sort of person. She left Butler due to slavery.  In her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, she left us an invaluable portrait of life in Jacksonian America's enslaved world, 

One cannot forget that Wister was a good friend to Thomas Dixon, the author of The Klansman: A Historical Romance of the Klu Klux Klan (1905), the third of his Klan trilogy, from which D.W. Griffith adapted the vile Birth of A Nation (1915). Spike Lee makes no bones about it. These books brought the revival of the KKK all across the US, which this time around was equally willing to lynch Catholics and immigrants as well African Americans.  Yet "journalists' etc. scratch their heads and wonder how such things as the murder of George Floyd, the beatings of elderly Asian American women, come to happen in this country.

One cannot forget either that Theodore Roosevelt's grandparents were Georgia plantation slaveowners, who sold a young girl to finance the lavish wedding at which they married off their daughter, Martha Bulloch to the New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt Sr.  Needless to say, in boy Theodore's NYC home, he saw his mother and grandmother what they could to aid and succor the CSA's efforts during the War of the Rebellion.

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Made a big kettle of split pea soup this morning. Cooked a sweet potato, mashed it, and folded it into the pea mixture of herbs, ground pork, carrots and red potatoes, plus some fresh squeezed lemon juice.  That sweet potato gave the rest of it a nice, silky texture, el V said.  “This might be the best split pea soup you’ve made yet!”  I have been making split pea soup for decades, so surely there had to be rivals in that time? What a splendid lunch -- especially with toast made in the new Toaster, a toaster than I now have.  Ha!

For the 6th time in the last 10 days we're having asparagus with dinner, accompanied by a bottle of Gruner Veltliner.  It's been a good spring for asparagus it seems; the Veltliners are plentiful in the local wine stores, good quality, and not expensive..

Best of all I was in the supermarket myself, picking out the asparagus -- myself.  I cannot believe the incredible pleasure I am feeling, shopping for groceries for myself in the stores, after over a year of not doing it.  Hey, I'm also a cheap date!  

I can't remember eating asparagus even once last spring; we weren't drinking anything then either except lots of tea, particularly herbals that promised soothing to the nerves.

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Mail is definitely slower these days. We’d been notified by publisher the second half of last year’s royalties was in the mail. But the check only showed up today. Audio royalties still to come.

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Recreational MJ was supposedly legalized today -- with enormous caveats as to who can and can't grow, buy, sell.  It will be just like the liquor licenses here -- very expensive, limited and mostly going to those who are deeply connected in the state's political apparatus.  It does nothing to make it easier for people to get access to medical mj either.  One still has to go through a gatekeeping 'state licensed to license medical MJ' physician -- yet another aspect of the necessity to be connected to the state political apparatus.  This requirement is really a license for the physicians who have them to print money.  A LOT OF MONEY.  They charge preposterous amounts to sign off on a form that they give you in their office to fill out.

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France shutting down again, for three weeks, due to massive surge in new Covid-19 infections.  Our turn again, soon.  When will the a$$hat$ running things ever learn?  Open -- surge; close -- contain.

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Still in the 60° range of temperature.  Overcast though, the predicted rain has felt imminent all day, but still holds off.  The western horizon looks as though rain is falling over there though.  Colder air coming in tomorrow night for a couple of days, They Say. 

I Moved To New Zealand

     . . . . After dinner on February 28th, I had no idea I was moving to New Zealand, particularly as I was already living in New Orleans due to NOLA Reconnect 2.  But I opened the first season of Brokenwood Mysteries then, and went for the second episode on March 1st. And there I've been all month every night after dinner. What follows are snapshots of how that happened while it happened.  Emphasis on is on snapshots. This is a fresh set of eyes, from an entirely different part of the world, landing upon a 7 year old television series purely by the happenchance of subscribing to AcornTV.

Brokenwood Mysteries, Six seasons (2014-2019), via Acorn.

     Season 1 (2014) New Zealand.  

The series centers "Senior" (title of address at the police station) Mike Shepherd, a detective in possession of the, by now, overly familiar shticks of the quirky detective.  He’s got a music genre fixation – Mike's is Country (Rebus’s a certain subset of 1960’s rock; Bosch’s is jazz, etc.), coupled with love of good wine (instead of whiskey, Scotch, Irish or beer).

He’s got the out-of-date car, that auto aficionados admire, a 1971 Holden Kingswood, but which, notably does not impress Detective Kristen Simms and Detective Constable Breen, Mike's distinctly much younger, fitter, more attractive and more down-to-earth, second and thirds. They don't like Country music either.  Mike’s an out-of-shape, rumpled mess with multiple ex-wives, whom most women still find very attractive, plus he has a dislike of contemporary technology.

Just off the top of one’s head, how many variations of this detective character can I come up with in 60 seconds, starting with Rebus and Longmire and Vera Stanhope (though sans the music and ex-wives, but she does like her Scotch)? Even Midsomer Murders’ Barnaby, when it comes to tech. Such a contrast with CBC’s  Murdoch’s Mysteries Murdoch's fascination with all new technology.

BM has beautiful, soothing, o so gazeable, rural locations that one never gets impatient seeing, shot in the series’s location in New Zealand’s greater Auckland region (North Island), 

including Helensville, whose post office stands in for Brokenwood’s small, but astonishingly resourced with tech and manpower (unexplained), police station. The closest city, Hamilton, is about 2 ½  hours by car from the fictional Brokenwood. Hamilton is a very minor though significant player in Brokenwood life, referred to constantly as a comparison to tiny (pop. 5000) Brokenwood, as well as a destination -- but we never break screen wall and go there ourselves.

     Gotten through season 2 (2015). Into season 3 (2016) now. Got a kick from the good-natured poking of fun at the crazy fans of the LOtR’s franchise who come to Brokenwood to tour Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth (that this isn't possible is part of the plot!), especially the big felt and foam spider, in the first ep, “The Black Widower.”  Impressed also by its pro environmental and endangered species protection message, for spiders, fresh water sharks, and the forests and the fragile habitats of shore lines. Another clever episode of season 3 was the Christmas episode, “A Merry Bloody Christmas.” which had seasonal, touching bits by Mike as to the belief in Santa as real. It turns out his nephew is an adult Down’s syndrome person, who receives tremendous joy from Santa, true joy, not commercial, not made-up or delusional, but true joy. This is the season the series revealed itself more clever in its writing than might perhaps be expected from the previous seasons. And sensitive too, but never ever sentimental, which isn’t possible even for Mike, who seems to possess a bit of second sight and romantic viewpoint, due to younger, thus more cynical, and down-to-earth, Simms and Breen.

     Into season 4 (2017) now. We’ve already recycled domestic abuse and in-the-closet stories, and now we are here again. I’m getting the sense this show isn’t in the least concerned with consistency of tone, or attitude. It seems focused far more on character, which, increasingly, as the minor regulars re-appear in the episodes, and characters from past episodes return, seems to remind the viewer that ultimately character is fixed.  Once a murderer – be prepared, s/he will murder again  -- particularly she.

     Season 5 (2018) They are going for episode fill-ins around the main plot, having Kristin sort- of-intrigued-by, but not interested by the courtship of Kahu, a gorgeous and smart young Maori, --  and somewhat of a playa. He is not the Maori character, Jared. (played by Hema Taylor) from earlier seasons, who was the only “cool” character on the show. The website for the series says nothing about Jared’s disappearance, or the sudden arrival of his ‘cousin,’ Kahu Taylor (played by Rawiri Jobe). Jared’s character reappears at the end of the season; the website says nothing about the reappearance either. I was glad to see his return. Throughout, the season also turned more bonkers, because so many of the characters are classified out-and-out as, ah, um, mentally disturbed, shall we say. Some of these are seen in other episodes too.  The most deranged of this season’s episodes is #4, “Dark Angel,” the plot of which centers the derelict Brokenwood Institution for the Insane.

     Season 6 already! (2019) Over the last two – three seasons, re-inserting characters from previous episodes into storylines of the later episodes.  It’s a good plan.  It makes BM more of a ‘village’ mystery series. But it's also darker even if more cosy than ever.  First episode of 6th season is set within Brokenwood’s steampunk community, “The Power of Steam” – PLUS – we have an incel.  Holy cow.  Is this the first depiction of Steampunk culture – as opposed to attempts to make movies, etc. from it? on screen? This isn’t a pleasant view due to quite unpleasant characters.  Certainly, inclusion, despite the trumpeting the the big point of the steampunk community is inclusion for the excluded, is not (always) the point, as depicted in the community's cast. or in the story line . . . .  Woo -- the final episode, “Dead and Buried,” brings back three female characters, all murderers, from past seasons.  They are in the private, for profit, Brokenwood Women’s prison, which isn’t like any prison one is going to encounter in the US – and maybe not in New Zealand either. Yoga classes? Knitting classes with real knitting needles? Shouldn’t this population -- as we know the characters from previous episodes -- be in an asylum for the criminally insane?  The female warden wears 5 inch stilettos, form fitting, sexy, yet elegant fashionable outfits – this seems more like a subset of porn that was once and maybe still is, of women in prison.  Plus, we got a lot of butch going on. But then, BM has had many episodes that include teh gay, one of whom is the minor, but recurring pharmacist character, who in the course of the series, becomes Brokenwood’s mayor.

This is an odd series, maybe we could use ‘quirky’ to describe it?  It didn’t seem to start that way, but somewhere in season 3 it started to make a turn to gothic and bonkers, while also, starting with the fake Peter Jackson locations for the LOTR films, getting in, sub rosa, comments about diversity and inclusion, the evils of raping the environment and destroying creatures generally, and endangered ones, particularly. These are the moments that have kept me watching, because while embedded entirely plausibly, they always come unexpectedly. One almost wonders if these 'message' moments are so deliberately composed that unless one already has gotten the message the watcher won't notice?  But I still appreciate them.

Most of all, because without them, one wouldn’t keep watching at all, it's the chemistry among the cast of characters that keeps one watching. The writers never made the dreadful error of attempting to manufacture chemistry or interest in the characters’ interactions via that exhausted “Will the male and female detectives finally recognize how hot they are for each other and DO IT!”  Brokenwood Mysteries doesn’t Do That.  Thank goodness.

I looked forward to spending time after dinner every night with Superior Mike Shepherd, Detective Krista Simms, Detective Constable Sam Breen and Medical Examiner, Gina Kadinsky, and the chemistry among them manufactured by their shared work. I like these people! I liked getting to know a lot of the other, minor characters too, not least Frankie “Frodo” Odos, as the guy for whom nothing ever quite works out, and Mrs. Jean Marlowe, who really does know everything about everyone in Brokenwood, without whom Shepherd would never solve a single murder.

     Season 7 (2020) of Brokenwood Mysteries begins on Acorn Tv on March 29th.  Then it will all really be over. 

Poets As Bookends: Lowells - Longfellow

     . . . .The Lowells of Massachusetts: An American Family (2017) by Nina Sankovich.

Another engrossing book about famous New England families. I will continue to enjoy this one until the 50’s I suppose and that Robert Lowell, who may have been bi-polar but was also a cruel and nasty person. From the very first Lowell in America in the 17th C, Percy Lowell, they were versifiers, even if Percy tended to do it as hymns.  It's a bit disconcerting how poetry, the desire to practice it, and then practicing it, like James Russell Lowell, ran through the various branches and generations, since so many of those individuals also suffered from afflictions that darkened the mind. James Russell Lowell's mother fell deeply into a depression when her daughter died.

But poetry continued to matter to educated readers, all the way through the era of that Robert Lowell then, a/k/a 'Cal' by those who knew him from early years, because he was like Caligula.

John Quincy Adams's life-long desire and dream was to possess the power of a great poet of genius. Yet he recognized that his every effort not only fell far short of genius, but fell far short of the quality he was thought he was creating while in the exhilaration of composition. He had the brilliance though to recognize this, even though he never gave up. This always warms me about JQ, among the many elements of his character that are so far from the received wisdom that JQ was a dull and dreary, dry fellow.

If it was true that the Lowells spoke only to Cabots, it's a wonder they intermarried with them, because in Boston, it was said further, that the Cabots spoke only to God. They also intermarried with the Lodges. There are so many Lowells and Lowell Cabots and Cabot Lowell Lodges, they usually have the same first names too, so I’m having a hard time with who is who.  Longfellow makes a cameo appearance only in this time of public admiration and sales of poets' works. Fanny, Longfellow’s wife, whose father got vastly wealthy working with the Lowells in their mill and factory ventures, isn’t mentioned at all.

This quick overview of 4 centuries of Lowells does make clear the division that rose among Lowells by the 1840’s and 50s, and why it came about. The wealthy Lowells (such as Fanny's father) wanted no interference with slavery and the south. They tried always to shut down talk and literature of abolition. Their mills thrived the south's cheap slave produced cotton for the tariff protected textiles they produced.  After the initial success of the Lowell mills, during which the farmers' daughters labor force were well-paid, well-treated, well-housed and well-fed, they became like their southern cotton suppliers and cut wages, created dangerous working conditions, increased the hours, overcrowded the dirty and vermin-infested houses,  and relied on punishment to speed up work.

The poor Lowells, however, were anti-slavery activists. Before the Lowells who got crazy rich from the Lowell factories, the Lowells all had tended to anti-slavery from the first days they arrived in the colony.  Judge  Lowell who, using the template of the Someset Decision by Judge Mansfield in England prior to Independence, declared it wasn't possible to keep someone enslaved who is brought into Britain. John Adams called these cases "The Freedom Cases"  this lawyer Lowell argued for -- and conducted successfully within Massachusetts, arguing that since in England a slave brought to free Britain could no longer be enslaved, and as Massachusetts was part of Britain, a slave brought to Massachusetts couldn't be a slave either.  This couldn't have worked in Virginia courts Virginia juries.

But the best part of this story of Judge Lowell is that it divided him from his family and community because he began as a Loyalist in the agitation that led up to the colonies declaring for independence, during the Stamp Act etc..  Because of the Somerset Decision he was sure that Britain was fair-minded and would decide in favor of the colonists' distress swiftly and effectively. He was shunned by family and community -- and lucky not to be tarred and feathered, stoned, or beat up, or his home burned, which happened to many who were labeled Loyalists.  That didn't happen, and he returned to the family as a full-blooded Patriot, who helped write Massachusetts' constitution, that overtly prohibited slavery within her borders.

Among the multitude of fascinating anecdotes the author has culled from the cache of Lowell letter quite lately discovered is this on. It was customary for upper, ruling caste, wealthy, Bostonians to send their girls and young ladies to the Ursuline convent in Charlestown for education. One of them, who would marry into the Lowells, experienced the terrifying end to this convent. The good men of Boston mobbed the convent because the Irish Catholics and the nuns had WHITE Puritan girls chained in the basement and whipped them and did Other Worse Things.*  They burned it to the ground. The nuns and their students fled out the back for their lives, hiding in fields of the farms, and gardens of the houses around the convent -- utterly terrified. Thus we see Pizzagate is baked into the USA DNA.

In These Times the most compelling section of The Lowells is the War of 1812, the "southern war", the "slaveholders' war", they called it - which indeed it was.  Lowells were passionate for quite some time about persuading New England to move to secede from the Union and join with England, becoming a new country of new New England.  I confess while reading this, I rather wished they'd been successful. For once I could appreciate the pleasure of alternate history, and this is the only spot in our history where it looked almost plausible, where everything else that came before would have had to change first. Even So, we'd still have had a war about slavery, for the South would never have remained within its borders, and neither would have "New England".

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* Whereas, these same men didn't give a fig about the girls and young women who, not classified as white, who really were confined and chained in basements or sheds or barns or prisons, and whipped, and experienced Other Worse Things.

July Has Been, Continues To Be, Not the Best Month But! Still! Reading Books!

   . . . . So much going on, with medical appointments, getting papers notarized, strategizing for a Big Project in the fall, continuing to do production work on the Cuban religious ceremonies and rituals, getting items to make our incarceration rather more comfortable and organized, my phone dying, trying to get the new one activated, which has culminated in our decision to change services (I still have my old 212 number, though I am clueless as to how to use this new one) and ordering me a new computer, which will provide even more fun than my new phone.

A lot of of this has meant Going Out Into Places That Have Other People Present.  At the moment NYC still seems to be doing fairly well with the rate of cases and deaths -- though for how much longer as outsiders and so many right here refuse to follow safety protocols at all.  Though the Governor has been forced to shut down some places and even pull their liquor licenses as the gatherings were utterly out of control.

So we've been trying to catch up with all the medical check-ups and treatments that got put on hold for so long.  I keep feeling this month has been the interregnum of Covid-19 spread in NYC, so we must rush to cram in as much preparation and prevention as possible.

Most of all, we've been working out the protocols and travel for our anniversary party on Saturday.  Which will be in the courtyard of uptown friends and include two other people besides our hosts and ourselves -- the recommended maximum of a gathering even outside. They are providing the lite meal.  We can enter and go directly to a bathroom to disinfect and wash, and from there a few more steps and we're outside.  There will be fans sitting about as well.  It will be the first time for us all to be looking on faces that aren't the same faces (presumably masked for at least part of it!)  we've been looking at 24/7 since March.  That's a party.  A real one. O my!

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As it has been since 2016, France and her history, prehistoric, Celtic, Roman, Gothic, Renaissance to the present is my real escape. The escape during this interregnum as been the Chief Bruno series by Martin Walker, set in and around Saint-Denis, a small semi-fictional town in the Dordogne of France's Périgord.  This region has been host to both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons, the Celts, the Romans, the Basques, the Catalans, the Goths, even the Merovingians (though they didn't penetrate meaningfully the south of Gaul, as they did the north and midi). This is the region honey combed with caves, some of which contain prehistoric art, such as in the stunning Lascaux. All this history enters into the series at some point, existing simultaneously with more recent history of WWI, the Resistance of WWII, and what is going on right now, whether the international monerd shenanigans of the wine and real estate corporations, PETA attacks on farmers in order to force France from the making and selling of foie gras -- anciently the cheap, dependable, filling meal of the region's poor  farmers and a usual addition to every one else's meals, the theft of antiques, racial and immigration and religious questions.  Whatever the contemporary focus is is though, murder is at the fore.

Frequently, Bruno reflects with great satisfaction that he is living where family groups have been successfully living longer than anywhere else in Europe. Thus it is to be expected the people there grow and cook the best food and make the best wine.  He loves his town and his life there with an ensemble of equally talented and decent human beings who all know and respect and enjoy each other -- and let us not forget the animals. Like food and wine, animals are all through these books to books' greater delights.

Last night reading along in The Resistance Man I speculated on a Chief Bruno novel of St-Denis and Covid-19. I bet it would be child's play for Martin Walker to pull that one out -- it would work too, in a way that doing a Covid-19 installment for most long established series just, well, cannot. For one thing, Martin, as mentioned, has various strands of the past constantly twining about what is happening in the present of each novel.  He fills the new reader in on the past of Bruno and the other characters too, if the reader is not beginning the Brunos at the beginning.  He's skilled at 'bridge writing' then, which again not all writers are.

So far the series has 19 entries, at least two of which are Occasional short stories.  They are short, and Walker writes fast -- a book a year in this series, starting in 2008 with Bruno, Chief of Police / Death in the Dordogne, the most recent, this year, A Shooting at Chateau Rock. I'm finishing off my 9th Chief Bruno tale tonight, having begun reading this series, at the very end of June.

We continue reading John Quincy Adams's Diaries.  We are nearly finished, which has me so upset, because this means JQ will be dead and there will be no more from this entirely unique figure and voice who witnessed, lived through and made this nation's history for his entire life.  Every time I think of this being finished I start to cry. Ya, I know.  But there it is. So  I am forcing postponement of The End.

Fordlandia

So currently we're reading aloud Fordlandia: The Failure of Ford's Jungle Utopia  (2009) by Greg Grandin.  (BTW, if you haven't yet read Greg's The End of the Myth (2019), do it now!)

Fordlandia goes along beautifully too, with the second and third volumes of Edmund Morris's biography of Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Rex (2001) and Colonel Roosevelt (2011),

as well as The River of Doubt:Theodore Roosevelt's Darkest Journey (2005) by Candice Millard.  Both Roosevelt and his son barely escaped death in the Amazon on this final Teddy's Excellent Adventure.

Ford on the other hand, really did die, or at least spectacularly fail, in the Amazon -- another capitalist, USian, racist fantasy that smashed against a reality he never even noticed in his meticulous planning.  Just like Roosevelt's hubris, refusing to heed anyone's warnings.

These days, others are running off the cliff just the same way, right this minute, alas, alas, alas. They are taking us, who do heed the warnings, with them.  Or more likely, somehow, protected by their wealth, power and lies, they survive.  But we don't.  Certainly the USA won't.

We never learn.