This one might be more for me than for you. I remain awed by Morrison - the last of the Midwestern writers to hit the big time. This essay comes as I am still trying to work out “Chasing Ashes”. My starting point was, however, Ross Lockridge's Raintree County where America is a multi-colored swamp; where race is a three-corner affair. The Native Americans are in the background, driven off from Indiana. The following seems to me as proposing the same in the works of Morrison.
When I was in prison a fellow from New Jersey asked if there were Indians in Indiana. He didn't believe me when I said there were none. I knew they had been removed but the details were either forgotten or never known. When I was back here and had access again to Google, I found out the removal happened in the 1840s. My Livingston ancestors got to Ripley County in 1819, and there were still Indians, but when my Hasler ancestors arrived in 1849, they were all gone.
This might be a thing that comes easier to Midwestern writers, that race was not always a black/white dichotomy but had a tripartite nature. Moreover, that it had a settler colonialist nature with genocide as a feature. Although Faulkner touches on the Native Americans expelled from his Mississippi.
We try hiding these facts, and when we cannot, we romanticize or otherwise excuse and deny our history. In my opinion, we do well to face up to our errors and the damage still needing recompense. We cannot let our hypocrisies fester.
When talking to my students about how to make sense of these passages, it is helpful to emphasize that Morrison always distinguished between a character’s beliefs and an author’s. She also adamantly opposed censorship, complaining of the canon wars of the 1980s that they threatened both to destroy a canon precious to her (“I, at least, do not intend to live without Aeschylus or William Shakespeare”) and to degenerate “into ad hominem and unwarranted speculation on the personal habits of artists, specious and silly arguments about politics.” Nevertheless, I have found one literary “sin” of Morrison’s rather more difficult to defend in these terms: her strange, often awkward representation of Native Americans.
***
Whether eager to condemn Morrison or quick to excuse her, these critics all take her analyses of race as a remit to apply that lens to her own writing. To treat literature as if it has a responsibility to fill historical gaps or adjudicate demographic imbalances, however, is to ignore the fact that fictional characters are not sources of historical, sociological, or anthropological truth. They are literary forms, a matter of aesthetic representation, not political representation. A focus on aesthetics is in fact key to Morrison’s close readings in Playing in the Dark, which she says are less about any “particular author’s attitudes toward race” than about “the origins and literary uses of this carefully observed, and carefully invented, Africanist presence”—one that bears only an oblique relation to the real human beings to whom white writers were responding.
***
We know this logic well, and still use it all the time in our discourse on race: there’s white America, and then there’s everybody else, fighting over, assimilating into, or forging solidarity against it. If we were to represent this model visually with regard to European, African, and Native Americans, it might look like a “white” background against which the “black” and the “red” encounter one another, whether in competition or communion. I want to suggest that, with her aesthetic choices in depicting Native American figures, Morrison swaps this schema around. What results is a “red” background over which “black-white” racial relations play.
After I came home from church, I kept having problems with engery. The air conditioner had my legs cramping. I napped. That did no good. There was still a problem of concentrrating. i got a little bit of work done with Montana, only stopping when I could not keep the fuzziness in my head.
Some other things I got into and want to share:
The restless eye of James McNeill Whistler(Engelsberg ideas ). Whistler fascinates me as an American. That I cannot rightly draw a stick figure makes artists fascinating to me.
A Eulogy (Sheila Kennedy) the distance travelled from decency to MAGA.
Even in an angry and at times despairing speech like “Sources of Danger
to the Republic,” Douglass retained hope for the future, calling on
Americans to secure the democratic promise of the nation. “Strike down
the one-man power everywhere,” he says at the speech’s conclusion; “make
your Government lean to the people, and away from the individual or the
one-man power.” If Americans are willing to do that, through
constitutional reform or other means, “you make sure the permanence,
prosperity, and glory of this great republic.” This is Douglass’ wish
and request to us from 1867. As in “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of
July?,” he reminds Americans of the still unfulfilled egalitarian
promise of the Declaration of Independence, and there is no better time
for such a reminder than July Fourth.
Some times behind paywalls, the sort of thing I try not to usullay post about.
Journalists still do, every day, hold
power to account. Think of Partygate, Plebgate and Barnard Castlegate.
Think of Jeffrey Epstein. So-called mainstream outlets may have become
smaller players in today’s vast information ecosystem, but, thanks to
journalism’s endless ability to reinvent itself, they have new allies.
Civic-minded, crowd-funded bloggers sit in local council meetings on the
press bench vacated by struggling or defunct local newspapers; digital
activists live-stream protests straight to YouTube; third-sector
organizations such as Greenpeace and Liberty employ journalists to
investigate their own specific areas of public life; for the first time,
a subscriber newsletter, Democracy for Sale, has won the Paul
Foot award for investigative journalism. Some of the best watchdog
reporting today is collaborative, community-funded or conducted by data
miners sitting in their bedrooms (see the work of Bellingcat), or by
digital teams supported by philanthropic donors. If investigations that
stir public opinion to outrage and demands for action are one measure of
success, then the recent television drama Mr Bates vs the Post Office (2024) probably had more impact than any news article about the Horizon IT scandal.
Yet the Watergate myth, of which Woodward
and Bernstein are an integral part, has persisted and even grown. This
is both because we need it to be true and because, in certain ways, it
was. Pakula’s film shows that, through a combination of legislators who
remembered their oath to uphold the Constitution, an independent
Department of Justice and FBI, and a courageous newspaper editor and his
reporters, the system worked.
As the name of Barney’s ship suggests, the struggles in Mysore stirred
the American imagination. Hyder Ali’s decisive victory at the Battle of
Pollilur, in September, 1780, in which he routed a column of British
troops, was documented and discussed by the Founding Fathers. Edmund
Jennings Randolph, a Virginia delegate at the Continental Congress, wrote to John Adams,
then posted in Europe, in April, 1781, of how Hyder Ali’s “Army of
80000 Horse” had “totally defeated” its British quarry. John Quincy
Adams, a teen-age student in the Netherlands at the time, wrote
excitedly to his mother, Abigail, about “the check the English have had
in the East Indies,” where they had “lost a great number of men.” In a
letter written in the summer of 1782, James Madison praised Hyder Ali’s
“superiority” over his most implacable foe, Sir Eyre Coote, the British
general tasked with pushing back Mysore’s forces from the East India
Company’s southern Indian stronghold in what is now the major coastal
city of Chennai. Nine days after the British surrendered at Yorktown, in
October, 1781, a group of notables in Trenton, New Jersey, made a
series of triumphant toasts that were accompanied by artillery fire; one
of those toasts hailed the “great and heroic Hyder Ali, raised up by
Providence to avenge the numberless cruelties perpetrated by the English
on his unoffending countrymen, and to check the insolence and reduce
the power of Britain in the East Indies.” (Hyder Ali died, of an
apparent tumor, at the end of 1782, and his son, Tipu Sultan, followed
as his successor.)
John Adams and his colleagues helped broker a
preliminary peace deal with the British in the autumn of 1782, in
Paris—a few months later, Britain would forge a separate set of deals
with Spain and France. But combatants in the subcontinent were unaware
of the initial truce that had been made in the West, and dozens more
battles took place around the world. The last clash of the American
Revolutionary War, some historians suggest, occurred along India’s
Coromandel Coast, in June, 1783; as the British laid siege to a fort in
Cuddalore, then occupied by a joint Franco-Mysorean force, a smaller
French fleet scored a naval victory nearby. The siege was finally lifted
after news of the earlier peace arrived.
What
solidarity Americans had with Mysore proved fleeting after
independence. France withdrew direct aid to Mysore following the 1783
Treaty of Paris, at a moment when Mysore’s forces could have pressed
their advantage. In the years thereafter, Hyder Ali’s son, Tipu, would
likely rue having allied with the wrong European power; the French,
struggling financially and on the verge of their own revolution, could
do little to support his kingdom against the emboldened British. In
1788, Thomas Jefferson, who was then the U.S. Ambassador to France,
wrote of the arrival of a number of diplomats from Tipu’s court, and noted
that he would attend their reception in Versailles, but was unsure what
any of it would achieve. “If their mission has any other object than
that of pomp and ceremony, it is not yet made known,” he wrote in a letter.
As early as 1792, the U.S. sent an American consul to Calcutta, the
East India Company’s main port in Asia—an implicit recognition of the
growing power of the British in India, and a sign of how the U.S. saw
its early trade interests in Asia best served.
This morning when I was first up, I finished up on Montana for my research project and did a little bit more.
Some neo-garage rock from a now-defunct Canadian band:
Got on a Cramps kick. Still The Queen: The Cramps' Poison Ivy Turns 70 ( Rock and Roll Globe); terrible photo of Poison Ivy, good overview of her career, and it is difficult to think she is now mid-seventies.
Second round this morning:
Up around 9:15 pm, wondering where is my new phone, and went down to the convenience store for smokes and Coke.
Back here, I started on my email.
A detective series I never heard of Nobody’s Perfect (1969) by Douglas Clark ( In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel) - a series I do not recall and not sure if I missed anything.
Listened to Jo Jo Gunne's So...Where's The Show - an album I picked up more than 40 years ago, lost, and now I am wondering what was the fuss? The band was an offshoot of Spirit, it's good, but nothing really stands out. Not a lyric to make me pause or playing to make me take notice. Why are the vocals not clearer? It is very much an early Seventies sound. It is competent background music.
The All-Music Guide says:
After the erratic and self-consciously weird Jumpin' the Gunne, this
album is a return to form. More than that, actually -- the replacement
of founding guitarist Matt Andes with John Stahely resulted in a
tighter, more focused, and generally more interesting band than ever
before. Jo Jo Gunne was originally formed to be, in Jay Ferguson's
phrase, "a hard-ass rock band," and on So...Where's the Show they
finally were one. Ferguson responded to the harder edge by abandoning
the synthesizer in favor of a jazzy piano sound, an inspired move under
the circumstances. The combination enlivens even the dud songs; "I'm
Your Shoe" starts as a pedestrian slow-grind, but has an incredible
instrumental break in which the whole band rocks hard and fast, then
drops out suddenly to let Ferguson take a wonderful and delicate piano
solo. The element of surprise gets you the first time, the brilliant
playing every time afterward. When the band actually takes on a song
with a half-decent hook all the way through, the results are splendid.
The title cut, "She Said Allright," and "Falling Angel" are all winners,
and there isn't a single track that is actually a dud. If it was
inevitable that Jo Jo Gunne was going to break up, at least they left
one consistently good album behind.
I am looking forward to Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. Last night, I tried listening to a video on what it gets wrong, and could not finish the video.
Seems to me an intelligent woman gave a smart answer to a dumb question.
Between the content and the comments, I was left thinking what a bunch of wankers. This is no way we are going to understand the mentality, the ethos, of Bronze Age Greeks. Enjoy the spectacle, if it works as a film. And if you think you can do better, then get to work at doing a better version. Lastly, probably every commentator thinks they would be fighting along with Odysseus rather than being a slave; reality would have tipped them towards beign slaves.
In her timely and punchy new book, the philosopher Daisy Dixon explores some of the most controversial artworks ever produced. She’s interested in how an artist’s character can influence their creations, and the harmful effects those creations can have on the world.
She’s not the first. Plato panicked over art’s power to corrupt citizens, while Oscar Wilde celebrated its provocative potential. More recently, Claire Dederer puzzled through the problem of what we ought to do with great art by bad men in her 2023 book Monsters.
Come to Depraved expecting a conventional view of art history and you’ll be disappointed, though. Alongside traditional media from prehistory to the present, including paintings, novels and plays, are more contemporary “art forms” such as video games; there’s also a lengthy tangent on pornography. Some of the stuff is so repulsive it’s hard to read about. There’s talk of live goldfish being pulverised in blenders in the name of performance art, and a film featuring shocking scenes of paedophilia. A video game named Rape Day needs no explanation, but Dixon won’t let you look away
***
What should our response be? Dixon isn’t shy about supplying an answer.
In the past, pieces considered too corrupting for the public gaze were
placed in secret collections. She believes depraved art isn’t something
to be squirrelled away, but confronted “loudly, angrily, beautifully”:
emotions that capture the spirit of this passionate book, which, like
those rewritten labels in museums, is going to delight some, and prompt
eyerolls in others. “The remedy,” writes Dixon, “is better speech. Better art. Better curation.” She makes it sound so simple.
One thing I have learned from my on-going progression through the bowels of the federal government, from the ICE agent who arrested me to my sentencing to my polygraph sessions to my supervised release - is the perversity of the custodians of public safety who are far more sex-obssessed than I have been since I was a teenager. Some times I feel like others are projecting their obsessions onto me and other times I am the focus of their prurient interests. So, no, better curation may not be the solution. I would add better education, less supersititious fear.
I started JoJo Gunne's 99 Days (Live, 1971) - which I do like, they sound like they might have been a damn good live band, a raucous party band. Why they remind me of Mott the Hoople with harmonies is something I need to think about.
The phone has not arrived and I just noticed it was promised by 9 pm!
That changes my plans for the rest of the day. Do I stay here or go to the grocery? I fixed black beans last night and they need chorizo and cilantro. Definitely cilantro.
There were more things read yesterday, but I am putting them into a post that is more literary.
I have also reached a bit of a crisis point as whether to post submissions or work wholly on the project, then go back to submitting on my fiction. I could do both, if I were nto having these problems where I jsut lose energy and coherent thought.
Maybe I was just not in the mood for the stuido album
I read - finally - Mishima in prison. A strangeness - reincarnations, honor, brutality - that incites attraction and also knowing it will be al little (more than a little?) incomprehensible.
Thomas Berhnard, a name heard of but not having a chance to read. From the following, I wonder if he might give us ideas to work with. I do wish there was not the comparison to Herman Hesse, who Kurt Vonnegut demolished for me more than half my life ago. Mario Vargas Llosa is almost as worth listening to as reading.
A few reminders of what we were and what we were supposed to be.
Three surprising facts about the U.S. Constitution
How we screwed ourselves:
Our problems lie in being a simplistic people (but is this not true of others?) and in not knowing our history (even if true of others, we should be doing better.)
An Ordinary Mind on an Ordinary Day (Lapham’s Quarterly) inspired me to take a nap this afternoon after I returned home and opened this article. Novelists pat yourselves on your back.
She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought,
an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of
spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly
accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who
achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to
five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of
unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave
our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration
strikes.
We moderns tend to attribute the thoughts that arrive unbidden, from
“out of the blue,” to somewhere within us, like the unconscious, but in
the past, people believed they came from outside us—inspirations from
the Muses or the gods. Yet even now, these spontaneous insights or
intuitions possess an aura and an authority that ideas delivered by
reasoning seldom command. We imbue them with a residue of magic, perhaps
because their origin remains something of a mystery.
A devoted novel-reader since her teens, Christoff Hadjiilieva
suspects that artists—who “live their thoughts”—may know more about the
stream of consciousness than her fellow scientists do.
And a rejection for “Scenes From An Indiana Factory Town”:
Thank you
for your submission to Sunspot Literary Journal. Although we must
decline, please know that selecting works for publication can be guided
by pieces we've already accepted for the current issue, a focus on
specific issues, and other elements that change rapidly. The fact that
we have declined your work should in no way discourage you from
continuing on this path you've chosen for your life. We greatly
appreciated the chance to consider your work.
Creatives like you
can change the world. Your perspective is unique. Your efforts to
generate something that makes an impact is difficult, and can feel heavy
when you work so hard without recognition. Please keep going. The world
needs to see things from your perspective.
Part of which may have been accepted for publication.
