Yesterday was a bit of a mess.
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.
Here’s the Frederick Douglass Speech to Revisit This July 4th (Literary Hub)
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.
All the President’s Men at fifty (Times Literary Supplement)
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.
Why the Last Battle of the American Revolution Was Fought In India (The New Yorker)
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.
Dream of getting some fishing in this year: The Susquehanna Strip: A Deadly Streamer Retrieve for Smallmouth (Fly Fisherman)
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.
I wonder what they would make of Euripedes' The Trojan Women?
Meanwhile, soimething more useful and educational: Was Homer’s Ithaca an Island? (Antigone)
Politics for this morning:
Depraved by Daisy Dixon review – a history of dark and dangerous art (The Guardian)
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
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