I never knew we wanted Brazil to come in with us on the Vietnam War. There is a memory that Britain balked, but that South Korea and Australia joined us. New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines are also news to me. That we sought Brazilian troops and how that did not to pass can be found in How Brazil avoided disaster in Vietnam (Engelsberg ideas).
My mother would always stop at a historical marker; she thought we needed the education. Inside Indiana’s 'best-kept secret,’ historical markers (Indiana Capital Chronicle) tells much about one thing Indiana does well:
The Indiana State Historical Marker Program began in 1946, with the first marker placed in December of that year highlighting the Indiana State Capitol.
David Steele, managing principal of the Steele Group, has successfully placed five historical markers in the near south side of Indianapolis. He calls the state’s historical marker program the “best-kept secret in the state government.”
Out of Steele’s five markers, he said he is particularly proud of a marker honoring Leedy Manufacturing, a factory known for creating Purdue University’s “World’s Largest Drum,” and the vibraphone.
***
And sometimes they include history that isn’t pleasant.
Trotter mentioned a marker that tells the story of John Tucker’s lynching in Indianapolis. It was placed in 2023.
Another marker notes the history of Indiana’s 1907 eugenics law, which authorized a forced sterilization program “to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists” in state institutions. It was placed in 2017.
I never read Mein Kampf, and I have no desire. Reading A window into Hitler's soul (Engelsberg ideas) reinforces what I have read elsewhere that it is a boring read, and that Hitler was a whiner. Frankly, whiny seems a prerequisite for fascists.
Rachel Kushner’s Advice to Writers (The New Yorker) - four books, all of which I have heard about, but have only read The Invisible Man; and What We’re Reading: July 2025 (The Common).
Western civilization is a myth. A history in 14 lives:
The Rise of Herod the Great (Antigone) - just in case you don't know the story.
W. Somerset Maugham began as a playwright before becoming a novelist and master short story writer (yeah, I know his status is questionable, but it is my opinion that he is a short story writer worth studying.) I have thought a little about chasing down his plays, but those thoughts have never gotten excited into action. Now, I read that Maugham is back onstage: The Constant Wife – a sparkling revival of Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece (Engelsberg ideas).
On the face of it, the idea of creating a play out of a play seems an odd one. Why not just reprise the original? Theatre producer David Pugh felt that Maugham’s play merited reviving, but wanted a female writer to give it ‘a modern remix’. Wade’s version makes nips and tucks to add energy, cut more quickly to the chase, and iron out a few dated wrinkles. It retains many of the original’s wittiest lines (‘It must be very tiresome to have three meals a day with the same woman seven days a week’), but also adds new ones, such as when our protagonist Constance reprimands her husband and his lover on their failure to cover their tracks: ‘I’ve had a mind to…ask you to please pull your socks up and get better at it because if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s sloppiness.’
Wade’s adaptation also has a more pronounced sense of farce than Maugham’s original and a certain ‘meta’ playfulness. Constance and her friend Bernard are repeatedly impeded from going to see a play called The Constant Wife, and there are knowing references to not needing to go to the theatre when one’s own life provides so much drama. Wade also provides several ‘set-piece’ speeches to appeal to a present-day audience. The first is a whistle-stop plot recapitulation at the beginning of Act Two, delivered with virtuosic pacing by Constance’s sister Martha. The second is Constance’s decidedly modern monologue about experiencing pain on her own terms, and refusing to resolve her quandary in the neat way others might demand. The new version undoubtedly delves deeper into the emotions behind the crisp aphorisms.
And a rejection came in, for a story I have overhauled since its submission:
Thank you for sending us "No Ordinary Word," and for being so patient in waiting for a response. Unfortunately, it doesn't fit our needs at this time. We wish you the best of luck in placing it elsewhere.
Sincerely,
The Editors
I tried reading It Can't Happen Here in my mid-twenties, then gave it up. I had burned out on Sinclair Lewis by that time. While in prison, I took the novel up again (and Lewis), and found myself impressed. The plot stutters a little - this is Sinclair Lewis - but it deserves to be remembered as a dystopian novel. It may be the only one written by a Nobel Prize winner. For a brief background on Lewis and his novel and its real life roots (which include a reference to Indiana) read Then Again: From his Vermont farmhouse, a novelist imagined a fascist takeover of America (VTDigger).
The novel impressed me so much, I wanted to write a screenplay. It needs to be done by someone. Also, while getting the links for this post, I ran across the following:
It Can’t Happen Here – by Sinclair Lewis – independent book review (Toby A. Smith)
I have not read any of Lewis’s other novels. But contemporary reviewers noted at the time that while IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE was an important book, it was not a great novel. I have to agree. The most interesting parts for me were the parallels between Windrip and Donald Trump — in the ways they both gain popular support and how each manages to defy the other branches of government that are supposed to ensure a balance of power. But once Windrip’s leadership descends into media manipulation, mass arrests and brutal enforcement — I found it harder and harder to continue reading.
Do I recommend this book? Well, I greatly admire Lewis’s clever, sometimes even humorous, writing style and I likely will now read some of his other novels. This one is certainly an interesting testament to both the cyclical nature of history and a novelist’s ability to be prescient. But it’s also no fun. So, you’ll have to decide on your own if you want to tackle it.
It Can’t Happen Here (The Letterpress Project)
Lewis isn’t in my view a particularly good novelist – there’s a lot of clumsy stuff here – but he is an excellent novelist of ideas. Replace the anti-Semitism of the Corpos with the current Islamaphobic propaganda and you’ll immediately see its relevance. This is a book that deserved to be saved from obscurity because it deals with issues that need to be discussed and it delivers the vital message that we need to always remember – we’ve been here before and we need to learn the lessons of history.
Review: It Can’t Happen Here (William Peace Blog)
The book is a sobering attention-getter without suggesting an action plan. Lewis was not a political thinker; he was an independent liberal who believed in individual rights. He was a reporter of what he saw and could foresee.
I would have liked to have found more before Trump got stuck in our political life, but the best I could find is Dystopias: An Extract from The Novel Now (The International Anthony Burgess Foundation).
...ut America has had its own bad dreams, like Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here (shamefully neglected) with its closely drawn picture of a democratic United States turning fascist. In a sense, this nightmare of the nineteen-thirties had been prefigured in the same author’s Babbitt, just after the First World War, with its study of socially repressive forces of American capitalism — expressed in small town ‘boosterism’. George F. Babbitt, a typical real-estate broker of his age and country, makes odd feeble gestures of revolt against the reactionary sanctimoniousness of Mid-West Zenith (‘the Zip City’) but gives in because his whole personal ethos derives from boosting, go-getting and the tame social orthodoxy. He is already conditioned to the materialist heresy we may term Americanism. This is a comic novel, but it shows the sharp teeth of the social critic.
Oh, well.
Rough day. I did not sleep well last night, the legs bothered me more this morning than yesterday. Work was not bad - done before noon. I beat it over to CVS for the topical cream. There I also bought a new phone charger - only I got the wrong cable. Back here for lunch and a lay-down. That lasted a couple of hours. I decided, okay, let's get a new cable. Off to the south Walmart. Dinner when I got back here. I went to work on this post and some others. I did some more work on "Colonel Tom". One more post to go and back to bed. For all it's worth, I want to cal in sick.
sch
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please feel free to comment