Mississippi & Journalism

Over the years I've not cared for this journalist and his points of few much. However, what he says he's been trying to do -- with his wife -- in Mississippi (and other regions not so carefully tracked in national media), what I've been trying to do these last months with Mississippi, which is to see clearly and as honestly as possible (which is pretty hard to do on both counts, for such a strong Opinionator as r me).

Fallows quotes a Mississippian who has responded to what he and his wife have been doing, the quote which includes these words, which for me are the heart of so much that so many of us get wrong about everywhere and everything:

I love my home state as much as an American can love the political subdivision in which he was born and raised. I do not, however, think Mississippi is a “great place.” It is not. In the present day it is a strange, tribalistic, confused and impoverished. However, I do believe Mississippi has great potential to be a better place. Thank you for sharing with your readers what many of us believe are the green shoots of some kind of economic transformation here. But more so, thank you for letting Joe Max Higgins and Kimberly Sanford speak about discovering ways forward from this dark, green, lonely place. 

Hattiesburg, Mississippi

That's it. The honesty of love, that does love, and knows of what that love is made, and yet understands what is loved is not a "great place" for whichever of the many reasons that can make somewhere not a great place.

It would help so much if that stars and bars would be taken out of the state flag that flies over the state's U.S. post offices.

Geography creates history, something that climate change should have us all thinking about very hard these days.  If not for ourselves, at least for our grandchildren.  Not to mention for most animals and birds, plants and trees.

Justice Stevens Wishes to Amend the Constitution + Constitutional History

John Paul Stevens sat on the Supreme Court bench 975 - 2010.  At age 94, he's published a new book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution.

He was an English major.  After WWII, in which he served in the Navy as a code breaker, he went to law school.  He could go to law school because the G.I. Bill paid for it (if he'd been an African American, however, there would have been no G.I. Bill for him).

What he's proposing for the Constitutional changes is discussed in the New York Review of Books, which is available to read online here:

Gun control, campaign finance, capital punishment, political gerrymandering, anti-commandeering, and sovereign immunity—it’s a heterogeneous list. But there is a unifying theme, which is the importance of democratic self-government. With respect to gun control, campaign finance, anti-commandeering, and sovereign immunity, Stevens would free the political process from the control of the courts. In the case of political gerrymandering, he would go in the other direction, because he would impose a constitutional barrier where one does not now exist. But the reason for the barrier is to improve the functioning of American democracy. It is only in the case of the death penalty that Stevens would create a new, rights-based safeguard, designed to protect an individual right, not to promote self-government as such.

As far as can be told from an article in the NY Review of Books, his ideas have merit.  But then, he believes that Shakespeare didn't write Shakespeare, because Shakespeare was written by Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford.

Justice Stevens winds up to throw out the first pitch before the start of the Chicago Cubs game with the Cincinnati Reds Wednesday, Sept. 14, 2005 at Wrigley Field in Chicago

Evidently he's also a Cubs fan.

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:

A&E Longmire, season 3, episode one "White Warrior"

A Western, A&E's Longmire is an unpretentious series, featuring Walt Longmire, County Sheriff of the fictional county of Absaroka, in Wyoming. Though Longmire is unpretentious, it isn't simple-minded, and it is gorgeous, shot as it is in New Mexico, with those huge skies and landscapes.  Fox Home has commented on Longmire here, and here, and here. The two previous seasons are available streaming from Netflix.

The new season's first episode, "White Warrior," picked up where the cliffhangers of last year's final episode, "Bad Medicine," left us.  This one had to be particularly difficult to write, because, picking up from last year like that, it not only had, to a degree, resolve those strands, move the story arch-line along, and it had to include all the ensemble regulars for the returning audience, as well as introduce them to those who are tuning in for the first time.

Robert Taylor's Longmire, as the central protagonist, naturally gets just about all the viewing time, but we do find out that Longmire's daughter will be back, though Cady's appearace was so brief as to be hardly there at all.

The scenes of easterner, Deputy "Vic" Moretti, were confined to her attempt to caregive to Walt, which perhaps bodes more of the show was doing to Katee Sackhoff's role last year -- making her more of a girly victim, instead of the strong, smart and o so competent law officer she was in season one, despite this region's being so different from the urban policing she'd done previously. Again the show went with unnecessary sexing Vic up -- having her uniform shirt unbuttone at least one button too many.

Lou Phillip Diamond was as brillant to watch as Henry Standing Bear, already has shown another dimension to his fascinating character.

Branch getting emergency care on the Rez

Poor Branch, played by the actor who was Forest on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, spent most his screen time in a hospital bed.

Longmire in front, walking with the "Ferg"

But Deputy "Ferg" Ferguson got some juicy scenes, that show us he's continuing to grow into his job and the actor into his role.

No more, for fear of spoilers.  Nor can the audience yet have any idea where this season is going to go.  But there was a bit of dialog that sticks in mind, spoken by a Rez policeman to Walt, about some of Cheyenne performing old religious rituals that went something like this: "Think of them as our version of the extreme Christian right."

So, no disappointment for this returning viewer.  It's nice to have this series rolling for summer viewing.

Reading Wednesday: William Faulkner and Southern History by Joel Williamson + The Second Amendment

The debate over what it means for a state to have a well-regulated militia got started around 1876 and has escalated in fire eating rhetoric, personal, corporate, political and legal, ever since.

However, after studying the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the historic, colonial background to the construction of both, what it means is 1) clearing Indians from lands white migration wanted; and 2) terrorizing slaves to keep them from either escaping or mounting revolts.

For example, in the context of tracing Faulkner's forebears, and where and when they settled in Mississippi, William Faulkner and Southern History (1996), frequently invokes both Indians and slaves in terms of the state militia:

Happily for their future prosperity, the Butlers tied their fortunes to the incipient town of Oxford, the place that would become the county seat and, in a dozen years, the site of the state's university. Early in 1836 the state legislature created nine counties out of the Chickasaw cession, including Lafayette. On March 21, 1836, the governing body of the county, which was called the board of police, held its inaugural meeting. One of the first things the board did was to draw lines establishing four political subdivisions.5 In Mississippi counties these were called “beats,” probably because the state was virtually conceived in slavery and the policing of slaves by jurisdictions labeled beats was the most important single function of government at the local level. This police function was carried out by the “patrol,” a sort of posse comitatus to which every adult white male of military capacity was required to belong. In Mississippi, the patrol in each beat was organized by county officers, and it was the duty of these citizen-policemen to enforce the slave laws. For the most part, this meant riding the roads at night to insure that slaves stayed in their place. Generally in the South, the patrol had the power to arrest, try, convict, and punish slaves on the spot. In  (p.79) Lafayette County, the patrol was recalled vividly by a black woman, Polly Comer, in an interview in the 1930s. Polly had been a slave in the Woodson's Ridge community in northern Lafayette County, and she stated succinctly the role of the patrol. “Dat's what dey keep de patrollers fur,” she said, “to keep de niggers frum runnin' ‘round at nite an' from runnin’ away.”6 The real, if sporadic, threat to black people posed by the patrol was caught, folklore-style, by blacks who sang a popular ditty that declared: 

Run, nigger, run,
Or the pater-r-olle will get you.7

 Ultimately, the patrol was the first line of defense in the event of a slave insurrection. In some counties of Mississippi where the slave population amounted to 70, 80, and even 90 percent of the total, this was a vital function. In Lafayette County, where the slave population soon rose to about 45 percent, the patrol was very important, tying nonslaveholders to the institution of slavery and heightening the significance of race. In Lafayette, Beat One occupied the center of the county and included Oxford. Beats Two (to the northeast), Three, and Four, (and, later, Five, created by dividing Beat Four), were ranged around Beat One in counter-clockwise order.

This book also made clear what the differences between Percys and the Falkner-Faulkners consisted of. These differences have nothing to do with Delta - not Delta residency.

The Percys were wealthy planters of the aristocrat class of the South, who planter aristocracy reaches back at least into the early years of Virginia.  However, Faulkner's family evidently began as prosperous mercers back in England, and never were planters.  They made their very comfortable livings by trade in just about everything, including slave and land dealing.  Running a plantation was not of interest to them, while filling their pockets and bank accounts with cash, instead of a planter's credit, was.

Tellingly, during the Civil War, the writer's grandfather, William Clarke Falkner (the "Colonel"), after mustering out of the army due to alienating his men, began land privateering, running Mississippi cotton via mule train out of Tippah County along the Mississippi*, up to Memphis, to sell it to Union dealers -- which was as illegal for the Union dealers as it was for Confederates.  Then he brought back luxury goods to sell in Ripley.  The two sorts, though both southern and confederate through and through, nevertheless, possessed very different ways at approaching their world.  For another instance, that vaunted paternalism of the Walkers is not evident in Faulkner's forebears (not that it went so far back in the day for the Walkers either when they needed hard cash, or a "Negro" just would not behave).

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

*  Mule train because by then the Mississippi was held and patrolled and held by the Union all the way down to New Orleans.

"Our Words Are Our Weapons"

Rebecca Solnit's article, Our Words Are Our Weapons: The Feminist Battle of the Story in the Wake of the Isla Vista Massacre, has been reprinted widely on internet sites.  I think I first encountered it on Slate -- or maybe Salon.  Where, predictably, the vast majority of comments were howls of outrage by men -- personal attacks upon her intelligence and accusations of man hating, rather than any reasoned response to her reasoning.

 

Rebecca Solnit has had the most reasoned responses to the Santa Barbara killings, or so it seems to me. But she doesn't connect all the dots in this matrix of domestic terrorism that include gun possession and entertainment that 24/7 invades our homes, workplaces and even billboards that show in graphic detail women being humiliated and otherwise violated for the fun of it. Or to sell consumption of everything from beer to chainsaws. Or to be awards provided for being the most violent of all in any fictional simulacrum of combat, including sports.

However, it's hard to see Our Words as effective means when so many men refuse to read them, listen to them or even understand what the words mean.

Post Delta Thoughts: Faulkner and Percy

Faulkner didn't have it in him to write the sorts of things with which  William Alexander Percy's memoir is stuffed.  The following comes after a long paragraph of descriptive rapture on the beauties of his family's Delta land and plantation:

"Such was my country hardly more than a hundred years ago.  It was about that time that slavery became unprofitable in the older Southern states and slave-holders began to look for cheap fertile lands farther west that could fee the many black mouths dependent on them ...."

That's at the top of the third page of Lanterns on the Levee (1941).

Nor would Faulkner have written anything like this:

 "... a library was as portable as a slave ..." which is on the fifth page.

But, praise be, Percy is so well-bred he will equate "a slave" with library chattel, not a mule, which is what most of his kind did -- who were nearly as inferior to Percys as is "the Negro," who once was "the slave."  Percy's too tasteful to say so but allows reader to notice for herself, as he uses "the slave" to introduce his family's library, how superior his family is to most of the other Delta families.

William Faulkner with his wife, Estelle, in front of their Rowan Oak plantation house, bought in 1930, the year he published As I Lay Dying. 

Faulkner makes no bones about how rough and rude are the ancestors of the Sutpens and Sartorises, and how rude are the next up-and-coming class, the Snopes.  The Sutpens did not move to Mississippi to feed their "dependent slaves" but because they were poor whites who couldn't get any good land in Tennessee, Missouri, Virginia and South Carolina, where all the good things were in possession of families like the Percys, who migrated out of the upper south, and who came to the New World as high-blooded, part of the English Percys.  Or at least so William Alexander Percy's family believed, and while professing such things mattered not all -- they were natural aristocrats -- they managed to make others aware they possessed such a background.

Trail Lake Cotton Plantation Harvest

The Percys did not live on their vast plantation of Trail Lake.  It was worked, first by slaves, then share croppers and planted all in cotton.  No Big House for the Percys.  Their mansion was in Greenville, where they could keep an eagle eye via the news coming regularly by steamboat on local, state, regional and federal politics -- though they were too aristocratic themselves for the life and death roughhouse sport of politics. The one time LeRoy Percy thought to run for office, he got soundly beat.

So are the Percys and the Faulkners so different because one family is Delta and one is not?  It's the contrast, that Faulkner's work is not the Delta that is part of what makes his work so fascinating.  The United States is geographically vast, and it contains multitudes of cultures, even within single states.

Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is as close as this nation has come to having a Paris by Balzac. Though I'm going to go out on a limb, since I don't read French well enough, that in literary terms such as style and form, Faulkner is a superior writer to Balzac. (I have read what people who do read French have had to say about Balzac, so that's what I'm basing this judgment on.)

I read Faulkner so avidly and often when getting my first degrees that I've internalized his work. However, perhaps the most important dimensions of work escaped me though of course I knew that his 'southerness' was the platform from which he launched himself into his fiction.

I'd been uninterested in Faulkner during these last decades, because I lost interest in Literature, because Literature with a capital L, like Art, like the Intellectual, no longer matter in shaping public or even private discourse in the way they did in even in the first half of the 20th century. But because of my own experiences in the South, the Gulf and the Caribbean in those decades, about 2008, Fitzgerald began to surface in mind again. This year, Faulkner, the greatest of those white American male writers (for me), has come roaring back. His work is revealing itself in ways I didn't have the tools to grasp back when getting my degrees in History and the Novel.

It's as true for some sorts of Literature as it is for history -- you must walk the ground to fully understand it to the bottom.

It is the same with Geography. Mississippi, and the Delta, make a mysterious land, as mysterious as anything ever imagined, familiar and alien. The only means to penetrate such a mystery is to learn the geography personally.  And lest one be tempted to romanticize this mysterious land, its bloody history will put a stop to it.

That was what Faulkner was up to -- his great body of work a burning sign that says, "This way great evil comes."  In contrast Percy is all nostalgia and lies, he who lived all his life in the elite privilege of wealth and family power, all received out of that cruelty that his kind put on the bottom of the pyramid that was southern society.  No amount of paternalist discourse about the feckless, childish, incompetent "Negro" in his Lanterns on the Levee can wipe out that truth.