Sunday Morning

Up at 5 and I cannot give a good accounting of the past 3 hours. I walked down to McClure's for carbonated caffeine and sugar water about 20 minutes ago. Laundry I am putting off for an hour. I did read through my email, mostly the news stuff. I scheduled a blog post that had been in drafts after reading three short stories, and I started two drafts, including this post. Research for the next segment of "Road Tripping" are in the browser. Not much accomplished, so far.

I found this while looking to touch up my memory of Herman Melville's The Confidence Man:

This summary is meant to warn but not discourage prospective readers. While reading the story, you might also keep in mind a sentiment Melville express in a letter to his friend Samuel Savage: "It is—or seems to be—a wise sort of thing, to realise that all that happens to a man in this life is only by way of joke, especially his misfortunes, if he have them. And it is also worth bearing in mind, that the joke is passed round pretty liberally & impartially, so that not very many are entitled to fancy that they in particular are getting the worst of it." The Confidence Man

I put in the emphasis. This sentiment seems appropriate to me and relevant to this  blog, as well as a message to you.

Before calling it a night, last night I read Cloaking and Hiding: Dressing up in Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘The Master of Ballantrae’ 

Some notes on my morning reading follow.

Merriam-Webster published 10 Surprisingly Odd Food Names, including my favorite sweetbreads (which I have never eaten).

The Los Angeles Review of Books' All Despotisms Must End: On Lydia Moland’s “Lydia Maria Child” by J. C. Hallman demanded to be read. Its opening paragraph screamed at me:

TO A LITERARY COMMUNITY that was left largely speechless after the 2016 election, I address these questions: At what point, exactly, do plots and attacks on democratic institutions (and often Democrats) — such as the January 6 insurrection, the in-home assault on the husband of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the plan to kidnap Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, the mailing of pipe bombs to public figures critical of Trump, and this year’s “MAGA king” orchestration of shootings in New Mexico (along with a host of similar incidents that have resulted in “far-right-wing extremists” being named “the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States”) — constitute a concerted series of acts requiring a response in kind? Relatedly, is there anything in the history of literature that speaks to those fundamentally committed to nonviolence but who feel themselves tugged toward reassessing that commitment?

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... Apparently, philosophers, too — or some of them, anyway — were thrown by the election of a man who, to this day, evokes, with his sartorial and cosmetological choices, John Wayne Gacy’s “Killer Clown.” Moland’s own postelection crisis, as described in a personal prologue, resulted in an acknowledgment that the practice of modern philosophy, too, is often rendered “impot[ent] in the face of injustice.” She was left a seeker — and she set out on a hunt to find a way to fruitfully respond to the sudden, awful tack our world had taken.

She found Lydia Maria Child.

Imagine the extent to which Moland felt called. She and Child shared a given name, and Child too hailed from Maine. As one of the United States’ leading abolitionists through the final stages of repentance for the country’s original sin, Child seemed a perfect point of reference for a parallel reckoning that began during Previous Guy’s administration. In 2022, there had not been a robust treatment of Child’s life in more than a quarter century. What Moland went on to produce is not only robust; it is also passionate and inspiring by turns, and conscientious in that Moland forthrightly acknowledges that, while the country needs no more “white heroes,” white Americans like herself “need more examples like [Child’s].”

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There is a line from this pamphlet that does not get quoted in Moland’s book. “In this enlightened age,” Child wrote, “all despotisms ought to come to an end by the agency of moral and rational means. But if they resist such agencies, it is in the order of Providence that they must come to an end by violence.”

Reader, this stirred me.

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