Awake Way Too Early

 The hip got me up at 2:30. Somehow, it is now 4:07. 

I forgot to send the PO my pay stub. I did that. Looking at the document, I need to get a full week of pay. Ouch.

I did some research on Raintree County. 

I listened to a podcast on Hemingway: Tom Jenks on Editing The Garden of Eden

I got through a couple of emails. From those emails I read:

1. Frank Logan’s Flying Dream by Dan McClenagh (Unlikely Stories, Mark V; a sweet piece of fable masquerading as flash fiction.)
2. Ray and Sheila at the 99 by Gary Duehr (Also Unlikely Stories, Mark V; another flash fiction, not a sweet fable, but of an encounter with conspiracy theorists.)
3. Also, Unlikely Stories, Mark V from "When Fire Splits the Sky" by Tyler James Russell is a novel except.
4. Interesting Literature's A Summary and Analysis of John Cheever’s ‘The Swimmer’ does a very job of dissecting a very strange, truly wonderful short story. I saw the movie first, then read the story, and while the film is a very good adaptation, it cannot capture the strangeness. 

I am beginning to think flash fiction is prose for poets. Not in my wildest imaginings have I ever thought myself a poet, or poetic. Unlikely Stories looks to be unlikely for my stories.

Far from those readings was Marginalia's History’s Imagined Past: How Scholars Invented Historical Time, a book review.

This is the important underlying presupposition of Oded Steinberg’s Race, Nation, History: Anglo-German Thought in the Victorian Era (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Steinberg’s study makes a simple yet radical claim: conceptions of race and racial perceptions of time played dominant roles in the development of historical periodization and the foundation of the modern European discipline of history. 

Steinberg’s story begins in Victorian England and crosses the English Channel to Germany. His story demonstrates how intellectual alliances between scholars (as well as national and religious commitments and rivalries) allowed for theories of Teutonic kinship, Anglo-Saxonism, and new approaches to historical time to emerge and flourish during the second half of the nineteenth century. The very idea of “Teutonism” and “Anglo-Saxon” identity as well as the notion that time ought to be divided into ancient, medieval and modern periods – and where the seams, transitions, or borders between these periods lie – developed among a tightknit group of colleagues invested in a shared future.

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Having established that the Teutonic kinship theory was used to construct a shared racial community across geographical and linguistic borders, Steinberg demonstrates how “a certain correlation was established between the method in which these scholars divided time and their perception of the emergence of national communities,” for “the appearance of a certain race at a specific space and time signified the beginning or the end of a period.” For many of the figures at the heart of Steinberg’s study, the invasion of Teutonic (that is, Germanic) tribes and the “fall of Rome” in the fifth century represented the watershed event that signaled a transition between antiquity and the medieval period, however differently that transition was framed by various parties, some of whom regarded it as a celebrated rejuvenation of a fallen empire (which prompted moreover the spread of Christianity westward) while others decried it as the onset of a barbaric era. 

The “Eurocentric triad” of antiquity, the medieval period, and modernity (which Steinberg calls the “historiographical ‘Holy Trinity’”) continues, in Steinberg’s words, to “dominate our general perception of historical time.” It serves a Eurocentric historical narrative, burying other – global and non-Western – histories under the weight, yet again, of European hegemony. But Steinberg demonstrates that already in the nineteenth century, alternatives existed, to which he devotes his final three chapters. These chapters study the distinctive historical views of Freeman, Bryce, and the Irish historian John Bagnell Bury, scholars who favored “a vision of historical continuum” and “unity of history,” eschewing a clear distinction between antiquity and the Middle Ages and, to differing extents, also promoting visions of racial fusion rather than division. Steinberg argues that Bury, uniquely, rejected Teutonism and Catholicism as forces of historical unity and sought instead to present the late Byzantine Empire as Rome’s successor, linking “the ‘old’ Rome of the West and the ‘new’ Rome of the East,” in contrast to most contemporaneous English, German, and French historiography.

I have wondered about similar problems since I began reading Orthodox Christian writings. The Orthodox Church did not follow the West into Scholasticism.  Byzantium had its own culture, and its own view of history. On the whole, I do not think the idea so radical - historians impose their own interpretations on the facts which constitute the past. It is just what humans do to reality.

I got one post done for Pretrial Detention. I may get another done, albeit the insomnia is running down.

Yeah, I think is enough for now.

sch 4:50 am