The Slings And Arrows of History

 I had run across the first two items earlier this week. Until today, I did not see the connection with the third entry.

Many posts will be found here about Thomas Mann and also about his novel The Magic Mountain. What I have never written before is that before Mann, all I knew of German novelists were the works of Hermann Hesse and Günter Grass' The Tin Drum. The former were pretty much demolished by an essay of Kurt Vonnegut. Having read Mann, Hesse seems small, even humorless (whatever humor there is in German.) 

Today, Grass's novel feels more in line with Hesse than I thought when reading The Magic Mountain. Reading Thomas Mann’s Pessimistic Humanism (The Nation) there is, again, the effect history had on Mann. But that history liberates Mann, and he expands on it. My memories of Hesse (who I did go back to read decades after Vonnegut knocked him down for me) is that history shrank Hesse. Is The Tin Drum a sequel to Mann's novel, showing what happened when the history that liberated Mann is distorted and censored? Or is it about history's resentments needing to have their day, their say, and the price paid for allowing resentments to breed and grow?

Yes, I am talkative today, when I should be taking of other business. And I am not done yet.

History has not been all that kind to Sinclair Lewis's It Can't Happen Here, according to The 1935 Novel That Predicted Trump’s Second Term (The Nation). The criticisms contained in that essay are pertinent for a realist novel, or a work of prophesy. Sinclair Lewis has fallen in my estimate, as he has generally. Yet there is a strange alchemy in his writing, if one goes far enough with him, it becomes difficult to leave. There is something stranger in this novel: it is quite unlike anything he ever wrote (not in style, but of substance); it is stranger than anything written by his contemporaries. I share with the Nation essay one serious criticism - that FDR would lose in 1936 and just disappear. That may be because Lewis was a Republican. A corresponding fault in Philip Roth's The Plot Against America has FDR returning as the country's savior. I am more sympathetic to Roth's overestimation of FDR, but wonder if there would not be others who could have taken his place. 

Speaking of The Plot Against America, this seems to be the literary heir to It Can't Happen Here. Roth's novel was marketed as an alternate history. I would have Lewis' novel likewise categorized. I know I exclude much of more traditional alternate history novels such as The Plot Against America and some works of Robert Heinlen. Thinking of it as alternate history is why I found many of the criticisms in The 1935 Novel That Predicted Trump’s Second Term irrelevant. What is relevant in the essay, what is relevant in the novel, is this:

Lewis’s predictions may not have come to pass in the decade after the book’s publication. But the myopic complacency summed up in its title continues to eat away at the country’s political culture more than 80 years later. All that remains to be seen is whether the pusillanimous Democratic leadership caste will come to heed Jessup’s grim warning that Windrip’s rise was the fault “of all the conscientious, respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.”

Sinclair Lewis identified the flaws in our politics, and Philip Roth reminded us of those flaws. Roth is correct, in my opinion, that FDR had the skills and the ideals to keep American fascism at bay. Lewis points to the flaws in our character taking control in the absence of a leader dedicated to democracy.

I did not intend to be so grim this Saturday morning. The sun is shining for the first time in days. So Why is English so weirdly different from other languages? (Aeon Essays) seems to be a fortuitous find in more than one way. It leaves a more amusing exit than considering American political and cultural failings.

There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and the rest with only modest effort. German and Dutch are like that, as are Spanish and Portuguese, or Thai and Lao. The closest an Anglophone can get is with the obscure Northern European language called Frisian: if you know that tsiis is cheese and Frysk is Frisian, then it isn’t hard to figure out what this means: Brea, bûter, en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk. But that sentence is a cooked one, and overall, we tend to find that Frisian seems more like German, which it is.

We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

More weirdness? OK. There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s – why just that? The present‑tense verbs of a normal language have either no endings or a bunch of different ones (Spanish: hablo, hablas, habla). And try naming another language where you have to slip do into sentences to negate or question something. Do you find that difficult? Unless you happen to be from Wales, Ireland or the north of France, probably.

And it is history - the invasions physical and intellectual - that makes English so strange.

That English is not a gendered language struck me in high school when I was taking French and German. Nowadays, it makes me wonder about our disputes over non-binary gender identification. Other languages do recognize a third gender. Do those who wish to pursue this identification in official documents want to change the language? Do those opposing them not see a gaping hole in English?

History has left us with two English genders, and time may change this.

What Americans must reckon with is their aversion to history - ours, the world's; of actions and of ideas.

And there I will end this post as conceived at its start.

sch 11/22

Writers: Advice; Thomas Mann & Colm Tóibín; Charles Portis; Chester Himes +

 Another collection of things I have read, watched, listened to recently about writing, or writers. I hope they help you with your writing, that they encourage you to write, or any combination of the two.

My Favorite Book About Writing is Not a Book About Writing 

Back in the late 1980s when I was younger and more impressionable, I was riveted by the PBS series The Power of Myth. For those who remember, it was simply journalist Bill Moyers and academic Joseph Campbell sitting in the Skywalker Ranch’s study-like setting, talking about ancient cultures and their beliefs. The graphics, what few there were, were amateurish by today’s standards. Campbell, who had only a year or so left to live, was prone to long, storytelling tangents. Moyers was a curious questioner, sometimes knowledgeable about the subject at hand, sometimes a neophyte, and always in awe of his interviewee. Not the kind of stuff one is likely to find these days.

The series was recently rebroadcast by my local PBS station (which may not survive much longer due to NEA budget cuts). It was based largely on Campbell’s book from 1949, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Nearly 40 years later, and hopefully more mature in my ability to understand, I found it even more fascinating. The breadth of Campbell’s knowledge about myth—particularly cultural origin stories—was even more inspiring than I remembered. He knew and could recite stories from dozens of cultures.

***

Later on in the book Campbell discusses the concept of the annihilation of the ego, so important to The Hero’s Journey. That’s an aspect of the journey that is rarely followed these days. So much of our literature, and particularly motion picture making, is devoted to the exaltation of the ego rather than its sublimation. But that was a characteristic necessary for the survival of the culture, because its underlying message was that a hero is not an egotist—far from it. A hero was devoted to the welfare of the people. And the hero was one of the people. Contrast that to much of today’s “strongman” politics, or mainstream entertainment, in which heroes are not just heroes, they are superheroes, an entity none of us can become.2

***

1 Although most writers are familiar with the twelve-step Hero’s Journey, according to Wikipedia, Campbell’s original version contained seventeen steps, and was trimmed to twelve for screenwriting purposes by Christoper Vogler, a Hollywood executive. The Joseph Campbell Foundation website doesn’t list the journey as individual, chronological steps, but expresses it as a circular path of interrelated actions. This representation is more closely related to what is in the book.

 While cleaning out, organizing my Watch Later list on YouTube, I found the following videos related to Thomas Mann.

There is this rather short documentary, which touches more on his personal life than delving into his writing:

 Colm Tóibín | The Magician is an hour-long discussion of Mann and Tóibín's novel about Mann:

 The Blog Of The South (Defector) discusses Portis's novel, Dog of The South. If you have not read Portis, you should. If you want to know why you should read Portis, then click on that link. No American writer is like Portis.

 Write Conscious brings together David Foster Wallace and David Pynchon, both writers who have left me bewildered.

 The Nation highlights the work of Chester Himes and his life in Chester Himes’s Harlem Noirs; which sounds like it only touches on his Harlem police stories. Like the man, it is more than that. I read his Harlem novels when I was young; If He Hollers, Let Him Go, when I was in prison. No, he has not the grace of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, but he has his own bag - an imagination, an honesty, a certain sort of fine madness. Ignored for too long, America needs to face up to him. 

Lost Literature: On “Picket Line,” Elmore Leonard’s Remarkable, Long-Unpublished Novella (Crime Reads) - anybody who has not read Leonard should; I see him as one of those guys who straddle the genre/literary line. He writes great dialog.

sch 10/21 

 Not sure what I expected from a site calling itself The Art of Manliness hosting a podcast on Hemingway, but The Writing Life of Ernest Hemingway does a very good job, steady on the writing, intelligent questions by the host.

Fiction as an Exercise in Sabotage by Xiaolu Guo (Words Without Borders)

I conceived this film after reading Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Since my film school years, I have deeply felt that the collaborative nature of filmmaking changes the notion of originality, as John Berger has stated in his Ways of Seeing. So when I read “The Death of the Author” by Barthes, I understand what he means when he says that in writing it is language that speaks, not the author. And it is important to realize that to write is to reach, through a preexisting impersonality. This is a perfect explanation behind both Borges’s and Kathy Acker’s retellings of Don Quixote. To write is to reach out, through a preexisting work.

Language is a superstructure, as Noam Chomsky said. It has a universal grammar that is beyond linguistic difference. Language is a system through which we writers move back and forth, travel within and beneath. But never truly beyond. Language is an infinitely vast code that cannot be destroyed, it can only be played with. A semiotic sabotage suggests that a certain narrative can be challenged, rewritten, and reconstructed, but it may not be replaced entirely. And the role of fiction, as radical it may be, is also inherently traditional and sentimental, therefore it is deeply humanistic.

Fiction is the art of narrative, it comprises the ever-changing human stories. It is the Dharma wheel that a Buddhist monk has to constantly turn, or a herd of deer in the wood that a Daoist would follow, wherever that path might take. Human life is spontaneous and risky; fictions have proved that. In that sense, all of us are warriors. We are at once saboteurs and builders, we destroy and we create anew.

Think about that. Read the entire essay. Think about these paragraphs some more. I am.

sch 10/23 

Something more practical, Free Talk: How Write a Satisfying Final Act for Your Novel (With Ley Taylor Johnson) from Authors Publish.

This video addresses one thing that has bothered me since getting out of prison - sensitivity warnings. The word anodyne is used in the video, and that seems to me to be a valid worry about our current literary output. It seems impossible to know what might set off an unknown person's sensitivity. Well, other than the obvious - sadism, brutality for the sake of brutality, racism and its related isms - which do not seem to be literary subjects in and of themselves. That they might be tools for a literary purpose is possible, but also damned tricky. See Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, and its history, for how the unpleasant can be handled in a literary way, while showing the problems for such works.

David Foster Wallace on the uses of irony may seem like an unlikely video for me. I may have my doubts about his Infinite Jest, I have no doubts about his skill and respect for his ideas.

Writers on Writing (60 Minutes)

Well, this post is more than long enough. I hope these were of help and/or inspiration for you.

sch 10/25

 

 

America - Outside Looking In

 Sorry, but this post is more about notes for a novel I want to write, “Chasing Ashes”. 

Coming back here to Muncie after prison has taught me just how much I am out of step. The gap I was gone filled with COVID-19 and the opioid crisis. I see and hear the effects, but they have no emotional resonance with me. 

Then, too, there is an idea gained from my reading in America about paying attention to the views of America from the edges. There are a lot of edges in America. Race remains the largest and greatest. Class and caste are in there, too. 

These pieces are examples of what I mean by views from the edges.

‘I was born in a melting pot. Melting isn’t fun’: Jon M Chu on Wicked: For Good, Ariana Grande – and living the American dream (The Guardian)

In a deceptively fun way – Crazy Rich Asians was the highest grossing romcom of the 2010s – both films tell a complicated, uncliched story about multiculturalism. “Melting pot is way more difficult than a word,” Chu says. “Melting is not fun. I got to be born in a melting pot, and feel the swirl and actually not even realise that I was melting until much later in my life. And maybe it’s not melting at all. Maybe it’s a soup in which we’re all still our own selves, in the same bowl. Not becoming one thing, but at the same time, knowing that coming together is part of the dream.”

Breathing Life into America’s Indigenous Stories (Electric Literature)

Bareerah Ghani: In the opening chapter, you write that all indigenous peoples are related but that your humanity remains deeply particular, “tied to our places of origin.” When you identify yourselves in your language, you essentially say, “we are our lands and our lands are us.” I am fascinated by your choice of the word “humanity.” Can you talk about it in connection with how land and indigenous identity are inseparable?

Julian Brave NoiseCat: In my people’s language, as in all of the Salish languages, the root word for people and land are actually one and the same, which has fascinated me ever since I started learning my language about ten or fifteen years ago. There’s this idea that there’s something essential about our humanity that is supposed to be tied to the land and the places that we come from, and perhaps vice versa, that land also lives in some relationship to humanity. I find there is something essential in the view that Native people, that people are supposed to live in relationship to their places. And I think we live in a moment in time wherein we are increasingly alienated from one another and from the land.

***

JBN: I think we’re in a moment in time wherein old myths about America as a land of immigrants, as a more tolerant melting pot, as a democracy, a land of opportunity, are very much falling by the wayside. I think that that has led to a broader crisis of meaning. What is the story of this land and this country? In that search, I would humbly suggest we turn to the First People and stories of this land to understand it. There’s a surprising amount of richness that stories that were nearly killed off by colonization but somehow still persist can bring to our conversation about what it is to be upon this land. Not just as Indigenous peoples, but as all people on this land. That has often been very much discounted. The story of Thanksgiving, for example, is one of the founding myths of this country and what’s really happening in that story is that the Natives were kind enough to let these starving pilgrims come over for a feast. That’s such a Native thing to do, such a generous act between neighbors, and of course, even those basics of the story are not remembered that way. There are countless other examples.

Part of what I’m trying to do, especially in the reported parts of the book, is to show how Native stories and the presence of Native people can reshape our understanding of these big ideas and myths about what it is to be American. For example, myths of race, assimilation, and colonization can add depth, not only to our understanding of Native people, but to our understanding of this place more broadly. 

Reckoning with the American Dream in Las Vegas (Electric Literature)

Like many new migrants to the city, I came to Las Vegas to chase an opportunity made possible by its wealth—though in my case, it’s a writing fellowship hosted by UNLV, offering me support for a new book I’m writing, and not a job in a casino or in the city’s various resorts and restaurants. This isn’t my first time in America, since I have been to this country for graduate school, as a visitor on writing fellowships, and during my childhood, when my family accompanied my mother while she pursued her PhD on a Fulbright. I navigate my new home with a mixture of familiarity and a newcomer’s wariness. My first few days in Las Vegas have me pulling out the accent I acquired during my graduate school years in Texas, and performing day-to-day tasks with the feigned confidence of a newcomer who nervously awaits the inevitable mistake that will lead to their exposure. I know the assumptions Americans make of people with foreign accents who don’t have the usual catchphrases at hand when purchasing an item or talking to someone on the street: these are assumptions my own parents have had to deal with during their own visits to America, cementing their status as outsiders when navigating the most quotidian of interactions. 

***

It’s one thing I notice about Filipinos overseas, whether I meet them at a party or at a store, in the dry, open landscape of Austin, Texas or in the lush, rolling hills of Wellington, New Zealand: an eagerness to name the occupations they once held in our motherland, or else a curiosity in regards to the roles I once occupied in a country they also unhesitatingly call “backward,” “corrupt,” and “poor.” Sooner or later, their criticisms of our shared homeland fall away, revealing a sentimental attachment to the lives they left behind and the identities they shed to survive in a land that promises new beginnings. They may be Uber drivers or salespeople in this new country, but in the Philippines, they were engineers, accountants, bankers. Those who tell me, “Pride can’t feed you,” when they begrudgingly learn that I’m an artist in this country, and not a nurse, will also randomly mention the prizes they won for their research back home and the businesses they helped start from the ground up, their eyes turning wistful as they stare into a past that remains invisible to other people’s eyes. If they’ve resigned themselves to taking their pride down a few notches in these faraway lands, their memories of their past selves remain intact, waiting to be pulled out like museum pieces preserved in glass when they meet a fellow countryman who carries a similar burden of memory, and knows the full weight of their loss. 

***

Then again, don’t I have Filipino relatives and family friends who are Trump supporters, who justify their political leanings by launching into rants about “illegal” immigrants sitting around and getting free housing, healthcare, and education, while they sacrifice everything to reap these benefits for themselves and their children? I have seen this selfishness before, from people who haven’t necessarily been left untouched by the munificence of the American Dream—I’ve sat inside their large houses as a welcome guest, while they complained about how unfair it was that they’ve had to pay such steep a price for the life America has given them, while others, by virtue of their disadvantage, have it easy.  

On the uses of a legendary past (Engelsberg ideas) makes a point that is worth brining up here:

Yet it is Oakeshott who understands what others have only grasped at. We cannot prevent the legendary past from being mistaken for history proper. It is integral to our political and social present. It shapes, consciously or unconsciously, the very essence of the political, fashioning the present by repurposing the bric-a-brac of the past. In his own idiosyncratic style, Oakeshott reminds us to acknowledge the philosophical distinction between the legendary and the historical, and to steel ourselves against myth masquerading as fact.

Most of what Americans call history is myth. We may no longer believe George Washington could not tell a lie, but we do not fully agree he was human. We may see a Manifest Destiny that looks more like genocide and racism to the Native Americans. That we have done terrible things as people does not justify doing more terrible things under the cover of a mythological virtue.

 sch 11/22

 

Neglected Books

 Before crashing yesterday, I opened several tabs on sites devoted to neglected books. Which is where I started this morning cold, cold morning where we are awaiting the first big snow storm of the year.

Why read read neglected books? I have always been an omnivorous reader. I have found writers who got lost in faddishness or just in the sheer volume of published works who had something to teach me, or give me enjoyment. You may do the same.

There is also the idea that people put in the work, did their job well, and should not be forgotten.

Another reason is history gets distorted by time and fashion and outright prejudice. What got published does not always line up with our teaching. 

Which leads into what is for me the greatest reason, that what has been neglected, secluded, banned, or suppressed may have for us a way to go forward - opening us to techniques, themes, ideas, viewpoints that can be used in our own work.

Let me use an analogy with rock music. After Jimi Hendrix, there was not much more for rock music and the guitar. What came was a heavier sound, more guitar solos, which limited Hendrix's influence to "Purple Haze". It also shifted rock music to being music for white people. Eventually, it became corporate. AOR, and classic rock. Written out of that history were black musicians, and the Hendrix of Electric Ladyland. Scraping away the received history, would take us back to Bo Diddley, Funkadelic, Sly Stone, Love, The Bus Boys, and Living Color. Make out of all that what you will.

The staring point: The Neglected Books Page: Other Sites about Neglected Books (2006) 

Surprisingly, some of the sites are still around. Some even remain remain active.

Dr Tony Shaw: Mainly the Obscure, and/or mainly 'Outsider' Literature has published nothing since 2022, and is is it a slow site. Unlike what you, dear reader, do with this blog, I took a look at his posts by Label. I am not sure what is obscure or neglected about Simone de Beauvoir or Daniel Defoe, but the posts for the former do discuss some of her books, while for the latter there are posts with photos of places associated with Defoe. It looks like a lot of French writers. If the site were not so loaded with images that it opened with a glacial pace, I would have read more.

How Jack London Changed My Life is current as of this past August. It is something to see - small fonts and full of text. All that was redeemed by the writer's fierce opinions. I admire Kazou Ishiguro, but had never read, if I have even heard of, his collection of short stories. I am not sure that I could have written this review:

Nocturnes – Kazou Ishiguro

After I read the first two entries in this collection I wondered if stories as lacking in merit as these didn’t disqualify you for the Nobel Prize (obviously not, for Ishiguro was awarded it in 2017, nine years after Nocturnes came out). In the first, “Crooner,” a once-famous singer takes his wife of many years on a return visit to Venice; he hires an itinerant guitarist (who tells the story) to go with him on a gondola as he gives his wife a nighttime serenade under her hotel window. Old love songs they once shared. But it turns out that it’s a goodbye serenade – the crooner is leaving his wife for another woman, and she knows this. The thinking behind this “romantic” gesture is sappy, and the three people involved lack substance (though we hardly spend any time with the wife). Despite the fact that the two men talk a lot about deep feelings, I found their words to be no more than prattle. The second story, “Come Rain or Come Shine,” is remarkable in that it is much, much worse than the first. The characters are ridiculous props, their actions go beyond stupid into the farcical. Sometimes I wondered if I was reading a comedy, or a bit of juvenilia. I was grasping at straws; the mentality that would produce such inanity evaded me. It even brings up the issue of self-respect: was not Ishiguro, at some point, aware that the story was junk and should never see the light of day? Anyway . . . Since I hadn’t yet read half of the book, I skipped to the last story, the shortest. “Cellists” wasn’t a redeeming masterpiece, but it wasn’t an outright bust. It had a glaring narration problem. The unnamed musician telling the story has total knowledge about the main character, a young cellist by the name of Tibor; he knows his thoughts, his words, etc. (How does this happen, Kazou?) And, as far as credibility goes (a problem in the previous two stories), the woman who sees promise in Tibor and gives him intense instruction (in words only) can’t, we find out near the end, play the cello herself. Yet she has a rare gift, an insight into what is right, what a piece should sound like. Well . . . OK, I guess. At any rate, I had now read half the book, so I was done. I did glance through the rave reviews from respected sources on the book’s back cover. It’s still the same old story, folks – the one about the emperor in his new clothes.

And not many would write of Pride and Prejudice like this:

 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Mr. Darcy was a problem for me, one that never went away. For most of the book Austen presents him as a man whose sense of superiority is such that he has open disdain for those who don’t meet his lofty standards. He’s also a meddler; he uses every resource to separate his friend from a woman who he, Darcy, considers an inappropriate match. Since he displays little feeling for Elizabeth, when his proposal of marriage comes it’s a surprise (her “astonishment was beyond expression”); she rejects him and catalogues her reasons for actively disliking him. Yet they will marry, and this is due to nothing short of a metamorphosis in Darcy. Suddenly he engages in all sorts of kind, generous acts. We’re to take this as an indication of his feelings for Elizabeth, but to me it wasn’t Darcy doing these things; it was Austen stacking the deck in his favor. Does she succeed at making the two credible as lovers? I saw no warmth on either side. Darcy remains wooden, and though the same cannot be said of Elizabeth, her most passionate moment takes place when she first sees his estate; the splendor of the house and grounds is such that she feels “to be mistress of Pemberley might be something!” When her sister asks her how long she has loved Darcy, she answers, “I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley.” Her mother is enraptured by the marriage: “Oh! my sweetest Lizzie! how rich and how great you will be!” Her sentiments are not just those of a small-minded and greedy woman. In the society of the idle rich depicted in this book (no main character does a lick of work) people maneuver to be in the good graces of those who rank higher in wealth and status. The two worst toadies – Elizabeth’s mother and the fatuous Mr. Collins – are one-dimensional objects of Austen’s ridicule and disdain. Yet Elizabeth’s friend marries Mr. Collins for the financial security he can provide. And Elizabeth? After her marriage she plans to protect Darcy from the “mortification” of having to interact with “vulgar” people. She “looked forward with delight to the time when they should be removed from society so little pleasing to either, to all the comfort and elegance of their family party at Pemberley.” (2 other books by this author are reviewed)

I found a novel I had not known about - what I have read about Tarkington's career, it petered out to dullness; now I am wondering:

Image of Josephine – Booth Tarkington
Tarkington produced dozens of works – mostly fiction, but also a good number of plays and non-fiction. He was popular both with readers and critics (he won the Pulitzer Prize twice). Five of his novels were made into films. As a boy I enjoyed Penrod, and as an adult I thought The Magnificent Ambersons was excellent. But, until now, that has been my only exposure to Tarkington. I was surprised to find, after completing Image, that it was his last novel. I would say it was a fitting closure to a long career, mainly because Josephine is a unique and compelling character. We first see her as a girl of fourteen, playing with friends. Well, not really friends; she’s too bossy, rude, imperious, she has too inflated an idea of her worth to inspire anything in others but hostility. At this young age her extremely wealthy grandfather (who dotes on her and encourages her outsized beliefs) puts her in future control of a fabulous museum he’s going to build, full of precious works of art. Skip ten years, the museum is built, and Josephine – now a beauty – is still thoroughly dislikable. She has no respect for her unperfected fellow-creatures; she walks over people or uses them. Another character plays a major role in this story: Bailey Fount, a WWII veteran who was severely wounded and is on leave to recover. Besides his physical wounds, he’s a psychological mess, so unsure of himself, so self-conscious, as to be almost a stumbling mute. As a safe refuge, he’s placed in the position of Assistant Curator of Paintings at the museum. Events occur that cause him to enter into a complex entanglement with Josephine. The strength of the novel is the way both these characters become more than they initially seemed to be. Is this evolution entirely believable? No, but I went along with it because it interested me. Bailey expands to assertive manhood, Josephine shrinks to the point where one actually feels pity for her. She long harbored a gilded image of herself, and when that image begins to crumble what she faces is a frightening aloneness. Yet she stubbornly holds onto her pride – or, at least, its remnants. The ending is ambiguous; the reader never knows what the future holds for these two. But, somehow, that Big Question works.  

 I found another novel that I had read, and for which I had a slightly different opinion - Albert Camus' The Fall is difficult compared to The Plague; I am not sure its philosophical problem is any more difficult than The Stranger; but there is it being a monologue that depends on how entrancing you find the narrator.

The Fall – Albert Camus (French)
Two men meet in a bar in Amsterdam (“May I, monsieur, offer my services without running the risk of intruding?”). What follows is a monologue: one man (Jean-Baptiste) talks to another (who never says a single word). This occurs over a number of days, at various meeting places. What we get is a prolonged confession, a dark one, but presented in a witty, offhand way. The speaker examines his life and the motives driving him. What he confesses to is his falsity and pridefulness and emptiness. The book is highly cynical (“Of course, true love is exceptional – two or three times a century, more or less”). Our narrator’s good acts are actually, under his scrutinizing eye, seen to be motivated by vanity, a need to be considered virtuous in his eyes and in the eyes of others. It amounts to a greed that needs to be constantly fed. And, it’s implied, many of the human species act under similar drives. I have few high-minded illusions about human nature, but I found Jean-Baptiste to be an extreme specimen – not a believable one. He merely serves the purpose of allowing Camus to make philosophical points. But to do so in a novel is a tricky proposition. Halfway through this confession I took the place of the man listening and decided that, if I were him, I would avoid meeting up with J-B at all costs. So why take his place and read on? Camus’s acclaim as a writer (the Nobel Prize at the youthful age of forty-four), and his death three years later (car accident), impart a certain glamor to his work. I may once have been impressed. Delete

YMMV, but it was fun, palate-cleansing of my mind to visit.

forgotten classics stopped back in 2007. I wondered what was forgotten about Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (1943)  I read this while in prison, so it was still in print at some time. The post makes sense of its inclusion.

Famous now perhaps for a handful of works – Brighton Rock, Our Man in Havana, The Heart of the Matter – Graham Greene was a profound stylist and experimental writer. His minor novels are often things of delicate and strange beauty. The Ministry of Fear is such a text, an odd, enigmatic work about salvation, memory, guilt and loyalty set during the blitz. Greene’s protagonist Rowe is a conflicted, grief-stricken man racked with guilt for the killing of his wife in an act of mercy – in a powerful flashback we see them both tacitly acknowledging what he is doing. Rowe attempts to cocoon himself away from his past and from his present, living from day to day and rarely reaching out to anyone. The war is not his business, and he lives mechanically. The masterly opening chapter begins with Rowe visiting a rather forlorn wartime fête in a Bloomsbury square for old time’s sake and ends with him in a daze looking skywards from the basement of his freshly bombed out house. At the fête he wins a cake which, slowly, it becomes obvious contains something of great value to the Germans, and a series of strange events lead to him being sought in connection with another, more violent murder, before being admitted to a sinister nursing home having lost his memory. 

No archive by subjects, which bothers me but probably not many readers - no one uses my archives to dig into what I have written - but troubles me here because there are some interesting lists here.

From that site, I got to Persephone Books (the link on the site above is broke, probably out of date). 

 BBC Open Book: Neglected Classics - I could not figure out how to listen, so I am putting this page here as a reading list. I read A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov, found him well-worth reading. But I suppose it could be neglected in regard to Tolstoy and Chekhov and Dostoevsky. I wonder if Carol by Patricia Highsmith is as neglected since the movie. I remember seeing the name Paul Gallico when I was a teenager, never read any of his books. Trollope is one who I came to read only in prison, with surprise and enjoyment. Otherwise, the other names are unknown to me.

British Women Novelists, 1910s-1960s: The 'middle-brows' reads to me as a bibliography (but why the green background?)

 Criteria for selection. These were all women writing in the first half of the twentieth century, who first published a novel before the Second World War. There are doubtless a number of other interesting women I could include: either I haven't read them, or don't much care for the individual writer. They were not necessarily feminist (although I did first discover several of them, marked *, through essays in "Man, Proud Man: A Commentary" edited by Mabel Ulrich,1932) but they do deal with the problems of being a woman in the society of their day, which is why I haven't included one or two writers who were dealing in the eternal verities of rural life (e.g. Mary Webb, Sheila Kaye-Smith, though having now (2008) read some Kaye-Smith (a close friend of the urban, indeed cosmopolitan, GB Stern) I think this characterisation may be a little unfair, as she did deal with the effects of economic and social change on rural populations, see this blog for further thoughts on the ways in which Kaye-Smith was responding to issues of her own day, even if she used historical settings: Constance Holme is in because she definitely dealt with rural society undergoing processes of change, especially in the expectations of women).

 Now, we are leaving the territory of the specifically neglected into a wider area of books you may not have read (scanning just the titles on some of these web pages, most are unknown to me).

 Open Letters Monthly is now an archive, the project having moved to Open Letters Review. Taking one issue at random, I found a review of a book I had read: Book Review: The Seventh Function of Language. Too much for me, who is already feeling overwhelmed by the written word. My topmost thought is this was a beautiful, well-written magazine that I am glad still exists as an archive.

 Open Letters Review continues the work of the Monthly with the same level of writing about books, but current.

Closing out this post for today - I have been four hours, more or less, on it, with Laila Lalami. I think I have seen the name, but looking at her site tells me I have read none of her books. What I have more likely done is seen her name attached to essays from The Nation. Such as Fiction Can Help Us Deal With Trump’s Chaos (2019).

These novels showed me what life does to all of us, how it tests and humbles and reveals us, regardless of our private history or public identity. And fiction does so much else, too: It gives us the infinite pleasures of prose, the surprise of encountering something unexpected on the page, and an escape from the tedium and stress of our daily routines.

“Now, wait a minute,” I hear you say. “Turning to fiction at this moment in time means turning away from a reality where awful things are happening. The president is a racist, for God’s sake. Civil rights are being violated every day. The forever wars are raging. An alleged rapist has just been seated on the highest court in the land.”

All of this is true. But we also have a president who manipulates social media to keep the attention on himself at all times: He announces major policy shifts on Twitter, then leaves everyone guessing about their meaning. Instead of spending my time reading the tea leaves of his pronouncements, I choose to spend it on novels. Making time for fiction helps me to stay out of the news bubble and ultimately enables me to be more engaged as a citizen.

I could not find anything on neglected books, but that is okay when what I found was writing worth reading.

While Goethe and Faust may not be as neglected as others, I wonder how many people actually read the poem (I did more than 40 years ago and have not come back to it since). So, here is Great Authors - Neoclassical and Romantic Literature - Goethe, Faust

 

sch  

  

Versailles, Indiana Lynching 1897, Research

I decided to do some research for “The Lynching at Paris” and “Chasing Ashes”, again starting with the lynching at Versailles, Indiana. 

 Hoosier hospitality, of a different sort.

Ripley County, Indiana, LYNCHED FIVE (Genealogy Trails, 2025)

Guenther-S.-Vigilantism-in-Versailles-Examining-the-1897-Lynchings-and-Rural-Perceptions-of-Justice.pdf (2024)

One hundred and thirty years later, the concept of mob law has largely faded into obscurity. The phenomenon, however uncommon, was once a prevalent reality. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, vigilante justice consumed the United States, claiming the lives of an unknown number of victims, many—if not most—of whom were innocent of the crimes of which they were accused. Indiana was no exception to these events; in fact, it became so infamous for mob violence that, at one point, it was used as justification by a southern governor for lynchings in his own state.3 With several dozen documented cases of lynchings, beatings, and tortures in the postbellum era, Indiana became well known for its mob law. The crucial matter lay in the isolation of swaths of southern Indiana, generated by the lack of rail lines, functional roadways, and telegram communication. This isolation created a fragmented state that, when 3 combined with economic hardships and struggles for modernization, fostered an environment where vigilante justice was seen as a tolerated and, at times, necessary evil.

Juicy stuff in that one, which looks like a paper from an IU student.

Versailles Lynching; The National Horse Thief Detective Association. (Alan E. Hunter, 2020)

In September of 1897, newspapers reported on the “Versailles lynching,” or the “Ripley lynching” in which 400 men on horseback came to the Ripley County jail demanding that five men there, all facing charges for burglary and theft, be turned over to them. County residents were being victimized by thieves that were becoming bolder and more aggressive – sometimes conducting their crimes in broad daylight. One of the most egregious of these, which was reported to have led to the lynching, was the alleged torture of an elderly couple who had hot coals put to their feet by men demanding money. The deputy in charge of the jail refused to turn over the keys, but was quickly overpowered.

“The mob surged into the jail, and, unable to restrain their murderous feeling, fired on the prisoners. Then they placed ropes around their necks, dragged them (behind horses) to some trees a square away and swung them up,” according to an account in the Sept. 15, 1897, issue of The Madison Courier. The men killed were Lyle Levi, Bert Andrews, Clifford Gordon, William Jenkins and Hiney Shuler.

When I wrote “A Lynching in Paris”, I put it in line with Indiana's Ku Klux Klan; it looks like I guessed right. 

By 1926 there were still as many as 300 active companies of the National Horse Thief Detective Association in Indiana and neighboring states. The western states version was known as the National Anti-Horse Thief Association and out east, the Horsethief Detection Society (founded in Medford, Massachusetts around 1807). And while by this time, horses were few, crime had not diminished much. By the Roaring Twenties, most of the NHTDA agencies had formed alliances with the Ku Klux Klan. It is this late association with the KKK that hastened the end of the organization and forever tarnished its history.

D.C. Stephenson, Grand Dragon of the Indiana KKK, wanted to take advantage of the broad legal powers afforded to Indiana’s horse thief detective associations. Stephenson utilized the Hoosier NHTDA chapters, still on the books but mostly forgotten, as his “hidden” enforcement arm of the KKK. He succeeded in having KKK members infiltrate the group. The post-World War I atmosphere fomented fears of political radicals, outsiders, foreigners, seditionists and minorities which played right into Stephenson’s klan plan. Stephenson’s klan latched onto fears of racism and, particularly in Irvington, anti-Catholic sentiment at the time.

A true report from The Ripley County Historical Society (1969).

The Hanging Tree Historical Marker

Lynching at Versailles, Indiana (Newspapers.com™) and 17 Sep 1897 - LYNCHING IN INDIANA. (Trove, Australia), show this not some obscure event, but rather notorious. The New York Times has coverage behind a paywall.

I first heard of the lynching and the gang from my mother's mother, Estella Downes, who was born in Ripley County one year after the lynching.

But Indiana had a reputation for banditry and lynchings, if the first link above is correct there may have been a connection with the Reno Gang mentioned below.

A Terror to the People: The Evolution of an Outlaw Gang in the Lower Midwest (Midwest Social Sciences Journal, 2020)

The Reeves Gang never received the recognition of groups like the Jesse James or Dalton Gangs in the border region of the country, but they did manage to escape the wholesale lynching that fell upon the Reno and Archer Gangs, who also terrorized the same general area of Southern Indiana. And though the Reeves Gang never achieved the level of a “social bandit” group supported by local citizens, they did evolve beyond petty crimes in Indiana. Moving on to Kentucky, they become a sophisticated and far-reaching group of safe robbers. Over the years, newspaper stories about George and John Reeves were of great interest to the public, especially as the turn of the 19th century approached, and their surprise arrest in 1901 brought back the memories of the so-called Jesse James types of desperadoes to a nation just beginning to idealize the days of the American frontier. Thanks to the abundance of newspaper reports, the Reeves Gang’s story, lost to time until this study, adds rich narrative to the literature of criminal activity in the Lower Midwest in the post-Civil War era.   

Midwest Social Sciences Journal has more than one Indiana connection - Valparaiso University and:

The Midwest Social Sciences Journal (previously Journal of the Indiana Academy of the Social Sciences) is committed to interdisciplinary social sciences scholarship. Its mission is to facilitate and advance the social sciences scholarship by publishing high-quality research. The Journal recognizes and supports the many diverse perspectives and methods in social sciences that directly address social issues and policies, including research that makes contributions to social science methodology.

We neither espouse nor champion any specific theoretical, methodological, ideological or political commitments. The Journal is committed to intellectual integrity, rigorous standards of scholarship, and rational and civil discourse. Papers are accepted for editorial review and publication in the journal at any time of the year from members and non-members of the Indiana Academy of the Social Sciences

Outlaw gangs of the 1870s and '80s (Hoosier History Live Podcast, 2021)

Billy the Kid and Indiana?

The Archer Gang – Terrorizing Indiana (Legends of America)

Much like the Reno Brothers had operated two decades earlier, the Archer brothers — Thomas, Mort, John, and Sam, raided Orange and Marion Counties in Indiana for several decades. Though these four were the primary members, the gang was estimated to have some 16 members, almost all of which were blood kin.

Though to the outside community, they were seen as respectable farmers and whetstone makers and millers, when their funds ran low, they turned “bandits.” They regularly robbed stagecoaches, trains, road travelers, and rusted horses and cattle. During these years, strangers, peddlers, and even regular citizens went missing, never to be seen again, and no trace of their bodies was ever found.

The Archer Gang, Indiana Outlaws on JSTOR (1947)

The Desperate Long & Phipps Outlaw Gang in 1845 (Phipps Genealogy)

Various earlier posts have discussed the Long and Phipps outlaw gang. The article below, which appeared in an Indianapolis paper in 1892, detailed events which had occurred far earlier, in 1845, but which were still fresh in the memory of some of the old-timers. The “Shack Phipps” discussed in the article was John Meshack Phipps, the same individual referred to as “Shack Phips” by Edward Bonney in his 1840s account The Banditti of the Prairies.

As mentioned before, John Meshack Phipps was the twin brother of Eli Shadrack Phipps, and both were sons of Jesse Phipps or Phips who had come to Owen County, Indiana about 1833 or 1834 from Ashe County, North Carolina. Jesse Phipps or Phips was a son of Samuel Phips (as most often spelled), who died in 1854 in Ashe County (now Alleghany County).

John Meshack Phipps married into the Long family and embarked on a life of crime with his Long relatives. The Bowling Green in Clay County which is mentioned in the article as a refuge for the outlaws is where John Meshack Phipps’s brother Mathew owned a store. Mathew operated that store until he suddenly supposedly “died,” being pronounced dead a few days after his close relatives robbed a competitor’s store.

The “Old Mother Long” discussed in the article was the mother in law of John Meshack Phipps. John married Mary Elizabeth Long in 1842 in Owen County, Indiana. Mary was a daughter of Jesse Long and his wife Levisa Stamper, who had also ventured out to Owen County, Indiana from Ashe County, North Carolina.

What Western features an outlaw gang in Seymour, Indiana. (True West Magazine). I've seen the movie; the scenery doesn't look much like Indiana (when does an Indiana movie look like Indiana -Breaking Away.), but added this to remind me that our history is obscure.

“But their biggest job came on May 22, 1868, when they hit the northbound Jefferson, Madison and Indianapolis train at Marshfield, south of Seymour. They broke into the Adams Express safes and grabbed approximately $96,000 in government bonds.

“That was just about the end of the gang. Within eight months, vigilantes lynched 10 of the outlaws, including three Reno brothers.

“The Renos were a remarkable outfit, far more sophisticated than most of their Wild West counterparts—and likely very influential. They received a lot of media attention at the time. Sam Bass was growing up only about 20 miles away; Billy the Kid was in Indianapolis at the time, and he must have been aware of what was happening 50 miles away. And it’s likely that the James-Younger Gang knew of the Renos’ exploits (Jesse and the boys hit the bank at Gallatin, Missouri, in 1869—the same town where John Reno robbed the county treasury in 1867). They may well have gotten the train robbery idea from the Renos.”

Train robbing as a profession began in Indiana with the Reno Gang (Indy Star, 2019) - maybe we should not have allowed people from Kentucky?

The Reno family, originally from Kentucky, made their way to Jackson County, Ind., around the 1820s.

Led by older brother Frank, who was joined by Simeon, John, and William (brother Clint did not participate) and other like-minded thugs, the Reno Gang cut a villainous path through Indiana as robbers, murderers and horse thieves. The Renos have the dubious distinction of carrying out the first robbery of a moving train in the United States. History credits the first train robbery in U.S. history to North Bend, Ohio in 1865. Bandits derailed the train before robbing it and its passengers. 

***

William and Simeon Reno were later arrested by Pinkerton's detectives in Indianapolis and moved to a jail in New Albany. Charles Anderson and Frank Reno then were arrested in Windsor, Canada, and taken to New Albany to join the other gang members. On the night of Dec. 11, 1868, more than 65 members of the Scarlet Mask Society got off the train in New Albany, marched four abreast from the station to the jail and overtook the sheriff.

One by one the outlaws, beginning with Frank Reno, were dragged from their cell and hung from the top of the iron stairway on the second floor of the jail. By daybreak, the mob boarded the train back home. 

 Hoosier hospitality, again.

Out of Our Past: Notorious Old West outlaw Johnny Ringo (Pal-Item, 2021) - better known as Doc Holliday's huckleberry; see Tombstone.

No, I am not omitting Dillinger: The Outlaw (American Heritage; April 1995, Volume 46, Issue 2) n:58707

sch 10/25

Indiana Writer: Michael Martone

 Before I say anything else: I am in awe of Michael Martone.

He writes these great short stories of Indiana. I think he might be the best writer of Indiana since Ross Lockridge, Jr. 

Kurt Vonnegut referenced Indiana in most of his novel (all, I think), but only God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater is set in Indiana. He wrote more about Indiana in Palm Sunday; a collection of essays. As much as I like Vonnegut, he is not a great short story writer.

Theodore Dreiser may be the most important novelist to be from Indiana. He never put a novel in Indiana. He does write of Indiana in his non-fiction. No one has ever thought of Dreiser as either a great stylist or as a short story writer.

Booth Tarkington did write of Indiana, and he could write a short story. Tarkington has lost his audience, except for dedicated Hoosiers and some academics. I find his style a little fusty and sentimental; certainly he belongs to the mainstream of his day. Indianapolis is his muse, not Indiana. Martone is innovative. 

Boring becomes strange when we start taking notice. 

Michael Martone's webpage.

YouTube resources for Martone follow. 

 Bookmark with Don Noble: Michael Martone (2023)

 8/7/25, Michael Martone/Virtual Thursdays Dire Literary Series, plus Q and A with Timothy Gager

Michael Martone: Tuesdays with BOA

Michael Martone Wins National Author Award in 2013 Indiana Authors Awards

Michael Martone on Re-retirement: “This Will Be Weird, Too” (Department of English)

sch 11/15

Going To The Movies This Past Tuesday - Rental Family

 I do not know why it has taken me this long to write what is really a rather simple post. This morning I put it down to ADHD or a lack of discipline or old-fashioned laziness.

So, I went to see Rental Family on Tuesday afternoon. I had seen the preview when I went last time to the theater, and there had been a trailer on YouTube. Brendan Fraser still carrying some of the weight from The Whale in Japan looked interesting enough. It could be that I think Fraser is a better actor than he generally gets credit for being. There has always been a bit of goofiness and vulnerability in a body that could have belonged to an action hero. Then, too, the first time I noticed him was in Gods and Monsters - where I also first noticed Ian McKellan (or was that his Richard III)?

The parking lot where the bus dropped me off - another gray Indiana day. The movie theater off by itself. Finally, the corn field to the north of the parking lot and theater - yes, we have farms within our city limits.

 I made tracks to see Rental Family because Tuesday was its last day in Muncie. There were maybe six people in the theater - it was the second matinée - who all looked at least my age. I had the feeling there was not much publicity for this movie. My take is that it was a Japanese movie with some American flavors. Spare, clean images and a story immersed in Japanese culture; leavened by a sense that fakery may not be the best solution to our emotional troubles. I got an idea that our American individualism (idealism?) requires a certain integrity. Japanese rules get broken by the influence of the American emotional bonding. The company providing rental families continues with changes. There is also one great scene, a shocker, that does involve Fraser. No violence, no sex, no superheroes, no explosions, just a lesson on empathy and the benefits of emotional attachment. The first time in decades I can say I saw a PG-13 movie that did not seem trite, that was actually worth seeing.

I needed some supplies, so I got myself to the Payless on McGalliard. While waiting for the bus, I took a few more photos.

 Pre=Thanksgiving madness.

And then I went home.

sch