Acephalous

This Day in Actual Communist and Real Nazi History

On this day in 1940, an actual Communist leader, Leon Trotsky, was stabbed in the head with an ice pick by Ramón Mercader, who was himself not only an actual Communist, but an agent of Stalin, who awarded Mercader’s mother an Order of Lenin for her part in the plot.  Upon his release from prison in 1960, Mercader moved to an actual Communist country, Cuba, and then to another, the Soviet Union, whereupon his arrival he was awarded a Hero of the Soviet medal from the head of the KGB, Alexander Shelepin.

On this day in 1944, an actual Communist country, the Soviet Union, launched an offensive against a real Nazi country, Hitler’s Germany, over the fate of Romania, which would end the day either a real Nazi or actual Communist coutry, but not both, because real Nazism and actual Communism are such different beasts that Hitler’s Germany went to war against Stalin’s Soviet Union over whose distinct sytem of oppression the Romanian people will be compelled to live under.  The actual Communists won the day, routing the real Nazis and installing an actual Communist government that would survive until 1989.

On this day in 1991, actual Communist tanks pulled in front of the actual Communist parliament building, the White House, in preparation for Operation Grom, a KGB-orchestrated coup against an actual Communist government led by Mikhail Gorbachev.  Within two days, Gorbachev would resign his position as General Secretary of the the actual Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and by Christmas of that year, the hammer and sickle—the actual Communist flag of the Soviet Union—would be lowered from the Kremlin for the last time.

For the latest breaking news about mock communists and ersatz Nazis, keep it turned to FOXNews throughout the day.

(x-posted.)

“Certain lives are not worth living. Certain people, we should not spend the money to keep them alive…”

Consider this a bookend to Ari’s post, as those are the words of Hitler according to this protester:

According to her and those like her, Hitler didn’t actively conspire to murder millions of people in the service of a racist eugenics, he passively refused to “spend the money to keep them alive.”  Who are “they” here?  Because she claims that “limiting Medicare expenditures in order to reduce the deficit . . . is the T-4 policy of the Hitler—of a Hitler policy in 1939,” she must be talking about those killed under the auspices of the Aktion T-4 Euthanasie: the lebensunwertes Leben, or “life unworthy of life,” i.e. the elderly, the mentally disabled and the otherwise infirm. Par for the course for those who believe in “death panels.”

However, if people like this protester possessed a perspective of more depth and extension than the Wikipedia Brand Knowledge currently bandied about conservative discussion boards and listservs, they would know, for example, that the T-4 initiative was prohibitively expensive. Its predecessor, the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses, or “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring,” which mandated the sterilization of the physically and mentally disabled, had been scaled back because it was too expensive. That is, they stopped, not started, the ideologically-based murders of those they considered defective because it would save Germany a few million Reichsmarks.

This should go without saying: the Nazis wanted to kill these people, they simply couldn’t afford to. In fact, it was only in 1939, after they’d planted a war on both horizons, that Hitler could justify the expense required to expand the T-4 initiative into the concentration camps.

In short, whatever Obama’s policy will be, if it is, as this protester claims, designed to reduce the national deficit, it won’t resemble Aktion T-4 one whit. Moreover, the category of lebensunwertes Leben wasn’t limited to those with mental or physical handicaps as we currently understand them: opponents of Nazi policy were routinely deemed to be insane and euthanized, meaning that so long as this protester and those like her are free to berate Barney Frank with patent nonsense, Godwin’s Law is still in full effect.

(x-posted.)

And the Award for Missing the Point goes to…

. . . Brent Bozell, of the ironically named “Media Research Center,” who refuted Oliver Stone’s comment that “Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch” by quoting a number of prominent figures in Reagan’s administration who thought Reagan was really smart:

I turned to Frank Donatelli, the White House Political Director under President Reagan from 1987 through 1989 . . . Richard Allen, Reagan’s National Security Advisor . . . [and] Gary Bauer[, the] Domestic Policy Advisor under the Gipper for two years[.]

All of them agreed that real “dumb son of a bitch” was Stone, who—according Bozell in a letter addressed to Stone—is an historian because he once claimed to be:

Some producer [of Comedy Central's Politically Incorrect] really thought in extremes when they pitted Oliver Stone and Brent Bozell for one episode. I have to say that you were gracious, charming, engaging, and we enjoyed ourselves—except for that moment when I chastised you for claiming you’re an historian. You bristled and denied ever claming that moniker. I cited the source, an interview in some West Coast paper (I can’t recall which one now).

Even though Bozell can’t remember the name of the paper, he somehow managed to re-read the article later and

[i]t turns out that you were right (in the article) and I was wrong.

So Bozell was wrong, Stone never claimed to be an historian, but that doesn’t mean Bozell wasn’t also right:

You are an historian whether you believe it or not. You make films about history and historical figures. You record history, and that makes you an historian.

Now that Bozell, through the cunning use of italics, has transformed Stone into an historian, he can finally slam him good and proper:

Being an historian is not the problem. It’s that you’re a lousy historian.

In short, Stone isn’t what he never claimed to be, but is what Bozell says he is, and a lousy one at that.  The evidence:

“Nixon always said Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch,” you said, and the audience laughed, and you smiled and decided to take that statement further by agreeing with it. So you said, “You know, I think that he was,” and the audience now cheered and hooted and applauded.

See what I mean when I say you’re a lousy historian?

There are two claims being made here: one, that Nixon thought Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch; two, that Oliver Stone thinks Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch. Unfortunately for Bozell, Nixon illegally taped every conversation he ever had, and when we consult his conversations with Henry Kissenger on the morning of November 17, 1971 [620a.mp3], we learn that while Nixon didn’t use those exact words—about Reagan, at least, since we know he used that particular phrase about everyone from the Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, to the Director of the Secret Service, James Rowley, to one of his own White House aides, Tom Charles Huston—he didn’t think too highly of the Gipper’s wits:

(beginning at 1:33:02)

President Nixon: What’s your evaluation or Reagan after meeting him several times now.

Kissinger: Well, I think he’s a—actually I think he’s a pretty decent guy.

President Nixon: Oh, decent, no question, but his brains?

Kissinger: Well, his brains are negligible. I—

President Nixon: He’s really pretty shallow, Henry.

Kissinger: He’s shallow. He’s got no . . . he’s an actor. He—When he gets a line he does it very well. He said, “Hell, people are remembered not for what they do, but for what they say. Can’t you find a few good lines?” That’s really an actor’s approach to foreign policy . . .

Admittedly, Kissinger lands the harder blows, but Nixon obviously agrees with him, so we can say with certainty that Nixon thinks Reagan’s “brains are neglible” and that he’s “really pretty shallow.” That’s not quite “dumb son of a bitch,” but it’s close. If only that tape continued . . .

(beginning at 1:46:19)

President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area. He’s got to know that on defense—doesn’t he know these battles we fight and fight and fight? Goddamn it, Henry, we’ve been at—

Does calling Reagan “a man of limited mental capacity” amount to saying he’s a “dumb son of bitch”? Oliver Stone seems to think so, and I’m inclined to agree. So, as to the first claim, Bozell is clearly the lousy historian here.

As to the second claim—that Oliver Stone thinks Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch—given that Bozell spends the majority of a letter addressed to Stone trying to prove that Reagan was the second coming of Thomas Aquinas, he’s not well-positioned to argue that Stone doesn’t think Reagan was a dumb son of a bitch.

In other words, the person who misremembered what Stone said in an article somewhere, but doesn’t remember where, who then re-read the article from he-doesn’t-remember-where and promptly forgot where it was again—this person thinks Stone is a lousy historian because he correctly cited Nixon’s sentiments about Reagan and correctly stated that he agreed with Nixon’s assessment. If I were Bozell—and could remember that I was Bozell long enough to cite myself—I wouldn’t be knocking people who don’t claim to be historians for being lousy historians when those same tables could so easily be turned on, say, a “lecturer, syndicated columnist, television commentator, debater, marketer, businessman, author, publisher and activist” who fancies himself qualified to judge who is and isn’t “a real [historian].”

(x-posted.)

Because, of course, Jack London sucks harder than many comics, Part II

(My commenters wrote my first response to Bill's post for me.  They nailed it so accurately posting what I'd originally written seems unnecessary.  I'm neither kidding nor, it seems, necessary.  So in the [likely] event of a [hilariously hi-jinxed] tragedy, Acephalous can [and should] live on.)

Let me start with a statement that will annoy everyone: if a close-reading reveals that a work flirts with the formal elements of its genre or genres—whatever they may be—that work should be canonized.  Not that works that fail to engage the formal limitations of their genre are uncanonizable, mind you, but works that succeed both as an example and a critique of a given genre deserve canonization.

But canonization into what? 

In an age of inexpensive and practically limitless storage, the question of canonization need not be hidebound to the idea of preservation.  Within its first month of operation, Google digitized the 99 percent of the Western Canon, and even though some of those works are too recent to be viewed, they'll all eventually be released as copyright expiration rolls forward.  When I began my Mark Twain chapter in late 2005, for example, only the 1894 edition of Pudd'nhead Wilson was available through Google Book Search; by the time I began revising the chapter in the summer of 2008, I could track revisions of the novel over the span of two decades.  Because Twain is culturally significant and canonical, the saturation of Google Books with variant editions of his most important works was inevitable.  

This was not.

When I began working on The Youth of Washington (1904), I had to order it through interlibrary loan.  It took three months to arrive.  Henry Cabot Lodge's George Washington (1889), Paul Ford's The True George Washington (1896), Woodrow Wilson's George Washington (1896), Worthington Chauncey Ford's George Washington (1900) and Norman Hapgood's George Washington: A Biography (1901) trickled in.  Had I held off on writing my chapter until I'd looked over all 140 of the novels of English Colonial or Revolutionary America published between 1895 and 1908, I'd still be waiting for interlibrary loan.  Now all those Washington biographies are available, as are most of the historical novels I wanted to read for deep background. 

Are those novels good?  No.  Do they deserve canonization?  No.  Is it significant that as tensions between Spain and America strained and Americans became uncomfortable with the imperial pretensions of their leader, an appetite for works relating to Revolutionary figures or set in the Revolutionary period become incredibly popular?  Might that not have something important to say about what Americans thought it meant to be American at the time?  Is that not a viable object of study?  Do I not ask a shitload of rhetorical questions when I get polemical? 

For a few of generations, English professors claimed that cultural knowledge was the provenance of the literary (what with perceptiveness being the core feature of literary sensibility).  So when a scholar wanted to know how things stood between America and Europe at a given time, they would not turn to any of the countless travel narratives written by Americans in Europe and Europeans in America, but to the most acutely literary accounts of the current state affairs.  To wit:

The problem with Lucy's account of the canon and cultural knowledge should be obvious: however you define the literary, it is not the same thing as cultural knowledge.  An alternate canon, based on how a text registers and reflects the conventions of its time, is required; a subset of that canon would include texts that fought against their cultural constraints in order to articulate something convention had difficulty accommodating.  No matter what you call those texts, they are the ones deserving of close-reading.  

Note that I slipped from speaking of genres in the first paragraph to cultural conventions in the last.  I did that on purpose.  Genre focuses too intently on what a thing made from words looks like.  ("My novella's a long short story in 10-point Times Roman and a short novel in 14-point New Courier," says the aspiring writer.)  From the get-go, however, these things made from words contained stuff like this.  Texts have always had visual components, and while those components are sometimes abstracts (as with the afore-marbled page), the introduction of visual representations of the world into the textual economy of a novel alerts readers to the presence of a realist ethos.  But remember: 

Verisimilitude is not an end.  It is an always imperfect—because always filtered—means.  What matters is not the presence of supplementary gestures of verisimilitude but the manner in which they interact with the text.  For example, this comic sucks:

The image of Red-Eye (from Jack London's 1906 novel Before Adam) adds nothing to the description provided by the text; in fact, it looks like what a sketch artist would draw if provided the description in the text.  Now compare that to this or this or this or this or this.  Why do I have to justify studying the subject of all those thises but can write about Red-Eye with nary a care?  Is it because Before Adam was written by London?  Because he wrote it a century ago?  Because a quinquagenarian with Ivy credentials stretching four generations back wouldn't feel mortified if caught reading it on the subway?

(x-posted.)

How to teach the interrelatedness of historical context and audience via Warren Ellis's Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth

Someone emailed to ask how it is I teach historical context via a single comic.  The book in question: Warren Ellis's one-shot cross-over between the Wildstorm imprint Planetary and the DC franchise that is the Batman.  Ellis created the book as a means of investigating the enduring popularity of the superhero genre.  Over the course of thirty-odd issues his team of quasi-cultural anthropologists tore through the history of the 20th Century in an attempt to answer that deceptively simple question: Why have impossible people in tights mattered so much for so long? 

Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth (2003) opens by jiggering that old comic standby: the multiverse.  An incidental murderer named John Black has been having seizures, and every time he seizes, a blue dome extends from his body and shifts him and everyone else from one dimension to another.  The dome looks like this:

 

The people who shift from a point in their dimension to an already-occupied point in another end up like this:

Not a pleasant way to die.  So the Planetary team is called in to investigate.  They learn that Black's fingerprints were recently found outside a soup kitchen and go to investigate.  They corner him in an alley when:

Justifying comics as legitimate objects of study, Part II: HELL STALKS ON FOUR PAWS!

I concluded the previous post with a nod to William Blake as someone who explored the word-picture relationship and I will get to that, but first I should clarify a few issues I raised without fully addressing yesterday:

1. Vance rightly noted that titles of paintings were often left to benefactors and history, so putting that much interpretive weight on such thin ice might not be the best idea.  I agree.  I fully intend on leaving this series of posts immersed and hypothermic.
2. JPool noted that treating paintings like panels could be a category error and Miriam and Gene implicitly agreed, suggesting I might be better served by a Hogarth or one of his ilk.  I agree.  But I chose to go with Caravaggio and Blake over Giotto and Hogarth because I wanted to focus attention on an individual image before I moved to discussing the interaction between multiple images arrayed in narrative.  
3. Andrew liked the arrows and will be disappointed with this post. 

Now that I have well and cleared my throat, let us venture forward to William Blake and "The Tyger" from Songs of Experience (1794).  It reads:

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare sieze the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art.
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Where to start?  Should I go full Keats and spend a day on each stanza?  Probably . . . especially when you consider that 1) his manuscript looked like this:

Because 2) he spent tedious years perfecting the placement of every word on every line.  Maybe I'll declare next week Blake Week and do just that.  But tonight I want to focus on the general impression of feline bad-assedness created by the text of the poem.  What we have here is a TYGER! MADE OF FIRE FORGED BY DREAD HANDS AND SHARP TOOLS OF METALLURGY TO HAVE DREAD PAWS.  So FEROCIOUS is this FIRE TYGER! that the poet cannot even imagine THE ABOMINABLE FOUNDRY in which SOME DEMENTED LORD created SO GRIM A BEAST. 

TRIGGER WARNING: IF YOU ARE NOT PREPARED TO LOOK INTO THE BRUTAL MAW OF HELL ITSELF DO NOT CONTINUE READING THIS POST BECAUSE I AM ABOUT TO POST THE PICTURE OF THE FIRE TYGER! BLAKE INCLUDED WITH THE POEM.  SERIOUSLY IT'S WAY TOO MUCH FOR YOU I MEAN YOU CAN BARELY EVEN WATCH R-RATED MOVIES THIS WILL BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU TURN AWAY I TELL YOU TURN AWAY!

Tell me it is, so that I might panic.

(x-posted.)

Doing some quick searches in response to our co-blogger’s co-blogger’s post about the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, I came across the following chart detailing the ratio of reported cases to deaths in San Fransisco.  Not only is it a priceless statistical representation of panic, it also captures the malleability of even professional opinion.  To wit:

I’ve highlighted the number of cases in red because blood is the color of riot—and for legibility.  With certainty, we can say the author of this study, W.H. Kellogg, captured something of cultural significance when he rocketed his data up and off the y-axis.  But the convergence of the incidence and death rates between the 23rd and 30th of November may be even more interesting.  How do we account for the fact that, for one short week, everyone who caught the disease died from it?  Easy:

According to the 21 November article, because public health officials claimed that “the influenza epidemic had been stamped out,” at noon “[t]he shrieking of every siren in San Fransisco, blowing of whistles, clanging of gongs and the ringing of bells will . . . signal for throwing away the gauze face coverings” (9).  Why were there no more new cases reported than there were deaths the next week?

Because someone said there wouldn’t be.  So there weren’t.  People caught colds and had the sniffles, but it wasn’t Spanish flu.  Couldn’t be.  The epidemic was over.  Did you somehow sleep through the infernal cacophany last Tuesday?  The city has no more need for mass-prophylaxis.  Everyone who catches the bug now brought it with them on the boat, and everyone knows you can’t catch flu from boat-people.  Wait—what do you mean, “How do I think it got here in the first place?”  What?  How come nobody told us—quick!  Everyone!  En masque en masse!

So said the San Fransisco Chronicle on 4 December, and back up the panic-axis we go . . .

When does a thing become The Thing?

The various newspaper digitization projects have allowed intellectual historians an unprecedented look into the codification of ideas. Previously, scholars argued that, through the careful study of texts transmitted over the wire, they could track the dissemination of a phrase from New York to the Canadian wild. The problems with this approach were, first, that it was an argument, not a comprehensive database; second, that it assumes ideas transmit best in print; and third, that as an argument it relied on a unidirectional model in which everything invariably flowed from the same source, through the same channels, to the same destinations. When common sense suggested otherwise, that is, when an idea clearly originated in Savannah instead of New York, the means of dissemination remained the same, only now the idea worked its way north to New York before being routed into the same pool and distributed through the same channels to same destinations.

I’m oversimplifying, obviously, and I’m not even trying to account for concepts primarily transmitted via the spoken word. The Great Awakening, for example, began anywhere people felt pain and had tents. It spread down from upstate New York and up from Florida and out from Appalachia with ease because it took the form of a common recognition, as if everyone woke up one morning and convinced only God could improve their awful lot. The lazy way to account for such mass recognitions invokes the language of biological warfare: weaponized ideas contaminate air and water alike, such that those who breathe what’s “in the air” swiftly follow Derrida, while those who drink what’s “in the water” embrace Foucault. Evidence that someone dumped a francophilic compound into the cooling system or water supply never consists of an epidemiological study of all breathers or drinkers; instead, we are presented with a measurement, in decibels, of the howls produced by the ecstatic afflicted. Measuring how intensely people predisposed to shouting actually shout is not, I contend, the best means of discussing the pervasiveness of a certain idea.

Suppose we wanted to know when Americans first came to realize that wars to their distant east and west were not two very large conflicts but one world-historical war. As mass realizations go, this one falls under the category of ideas anyone could have had, had he but thought about it a bit; and after 1 September 1939 everyone thought about it a bit more. But they didn’t call it World War II or the Second World War. Newspapers spoke of the Sino-Japanese War and the European War, but as 1939 came to a close, America does not seem to have connected the two—at least not idiomatically. If you want to know when, precisely, Americans understood they were in the midst of a second world war, there are two ways to find out:

1. find the first mention of “World War I” (not “the First World War,” for reasons I’ll explain shortly)
2. find the first mention of “World War II” or “the Second World War”

Lest I seem too gushing about these databases, let me preface my remarks on the first search by noting that finding relevant entries for “world war i” in a database is a damn chore. Even when you limit the search to the years in which the shift would’ve most likely occurred—say, 1939 to 1941—you’re still presented thousands upon thousands of false positives. You have your memoirs and editorials:

During the World War I enlisted for service and went to France . . .

You have your academic studies:

Fluctuation of the Populations During the World War I: Germany and France . . .

You have your OCR artifacts:

With all that noise, you might think it best to change the signal to something louder but equally ordinal, like “the first world war,” but then you encounter another difficulty: Americans, always a confident lot, flipped fate the bird by referring to WWI as “the Great War” or “the First World War.” They meant “the First World War” not as we do, i.e. “the first of two,” but as “the first in which the entire world became a combat theater.” Our best bet, then, would be to look for the first appearances of “World War II” or “the Second World War.” So when did Americans come to understand that the wars raging on opposite sides of the globe were different aspects of a single conflict?

Not immediately. After Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, the LA Times wrote of “the European crisis” (”British Mobilize Army and Fleet,” 1) and the New York Times provided “Bulletins on Europe’s Conflict” (1). By 2 September, the United Press Syndicate noted that “[w]ithin a few hours the British and French parliaments are likely to declare war on Adolf Hitler’s greater German Reich and the second great world war may be under way (”Allies Ready to Enter War,” 1) and Walter Lippmann’s “Estimate of the Situation” was that the conflict would come to be known as either “the European war” or “the white war” (LA Times, A4). Lippmann was hesitant to call the conflict a world war because—presentist accounts of eurocentrism to the contrary—most people refused to consider a war fought by Britain, France, Germany and Italy sufficiently worldly. Japan had taunted the British, but instead of continuing that fight, Britain recalled the Royal Navy and, alongside the prides of the Polish fleet, prepared for the European war. This meant the war would have a largely European theater, because, as Lippmann wrote, “[t]he United States is too strong for Japan.” The Sino-Japanese War would continue, but because the western powers wouldn’t be drawn into it, this was to be a fight for “mastery of the Old World,” not the whole world.

I lean heavily on Lippmann here, but only because he’s representative of the consensus that was forming prior to Japan’s attack on Changsha in late September 1939. The Chinese had been stalling the Japanese by means of scorched earth and slow retreat: the Japanese would “win” a battle by forcing the Chinese ever deeper into their own briar patch. By early 1939, the Japanese Army was in such disrepair that the threat of an American embargo effectively ended Japanese hostilities against the British. The New York Times reported that “[t]he impression in diplomatic circles was that Japan, in view of the European war and the turn-about by Germany on the Russian question, was feeling isolated and was turning toward the United States” (”Japanese Bid Seen for U.S. Friendship,” 1). On 16 September, it seemed that on the basis of the alliances then being hammered out, the conflict could not go global. Exploratory discussions and mutual non-aggression pacts mean little once they end, but for the moment it seemed as if the discussions were as fruitful as the pacts were binding. Acting on the latter belief, Japan took advantage of its pact with Russia to move troops from Manchukuoan border and resume active hostitlities against China.

Thus on 19 September, Americans were faced with the European Crisis and the China Affair. In a letter to the editors of the Wall Street Journal, Walter Parker urged that “[n]o matter what else the United States may do to keep out of war, and to deal with the effects of World War No. 2, it should prepare for the peace that will come some day” (”Letters to the Editor,” 4). Catchy name, “World War No. 2,” and important because it demonstrates that some people—even if they’re limited to Walter Parker—had begun to think of the present wars as a singular sequel to the earlier conflict. The sentiment was there, even if the locution was clunky. In its 31 December edition, however, the LA Times would christen it proper:

Ill-omened and fateful, the year 1939 wove into the pattern of history a chronicle of war and violence. Marking, as it did, the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the World War, it became in itself a starting point for the calculation in the future of the state of “World War II.” (”Review of the Year,” A5).

It’d be better were it stripped of scare-quotes, but those scare-quotes aren’t meaningless. They point to the tentativeness that precedes any codification, and in such surveys, pointing is imoprtant. Anyhow, I know these aren’t the first two iterations of the phrase, but as the databases expand, so too will our ability to pinpoint the exact historical moment when a thing became The Thing.

All of which is an extremely round-about way of asking when, exactly, will we see “the Great Depression II” or “the Second Great Depression” naked in a major media outlet?  Moreover, when we feel like we ought to be, and how will future generations figure out when that was?

(x-posted.)

"If you liked Annie, you'll love Rags to Riches."*

Today I learned that as often as I throw around the phrase "Horatio Alger novels," I'd be hard-pressed to list many works that fit the bill.  There are, of course, novels written by Horatio Alger, but even they only qualify on a technicality.  (Plus, not all of Alger's novels rely on pluck and luck to drive the narrative.)  Not that his novels weren't enormously popular, as over 17,000,000 million copies were sold in the 1860s through 1880s.  Nor was their uplifting ideology incidental, as the popularity of C. B. Seymour's Self-Made Man (1858) and Freeman Hunt's Lives of American Merchants (1858) attest. 

But as pervasive as Alger's rags-to-riches ethos is assumed to be, I can't think of many novels which present—much less endorse—it.  Literary scholars prefer to toss off references to humble bootstrappers as if hundreds upon thousands of novels described their ascent up the social ladder.  Maybe there are, but most encounters with the phrase "Horatio Alger novels" are purely contrary.  We have the first fifteen chapters of every Jack London novel.  We have Robert Penn Warren calling Theodore Dreiser's The Financier an attempt to modernize the Horatio Alger myth (Homage 56).  We have Richard Wright identifying it as the locus classicus of capitalist mystification in Black Boy:

I dreamed of going north and writing books, novels. The North symbolized to me all that I had not felt and seen; it had no relation whatever to what actually existed. Yet, by imagining a place where everything was possible, I kept hope alive in me. But where had I got this notion of doing something in the future, of going away from home and accomplishing something that would be recognized by others? I had, of course, read my Horatio Alger stories, my pulp stories, and I knew my Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford series from cover to cover, though I had sense enough not to hope to get rich; even to my naive imagination that possibility was too remote." (161)

What we have isn't a robust literary tradition of Horatio Alger-type novels so much as a steady stream of anti-Horatio Alger-type novels beginning with the last chapter of every London novel and Dreiser's Trilogy of Desire (about Frank Algernon Cowperwood) and continuing through naturalist eviscerations of pat moral didacticism in Wright and Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.  Whither the tradition they counter?  Wright's autobiography and Bellow's autobiographical novel clearly respond to the narrative form of Alger's novels, but that brings us back to Alger as the only author proper to his category. 

I'm tempted to say that this is yet another case of savvy critics trying to account for the popularity of atrocious novels by appealing to a grand ideology that predisposed a given audience to swallow shallow tripe—but then my student, the one who humbled me this afternoon, wouldn't know the names of any earnest iterations of the Horatio Alger narrative.  Any suggestions?

---

*Being the tagline of NBC's ill-fated attempt to hijack Annie's bandwagon.

The high price of idealism

(x-posted.)

On this day in 2008, Jim Beaver—a.k.a. Ellsworth—commented on my post about the language of Deadwood.  I know that’s not really historical, but damn it, it’s cool.  Now for something completely historical:

On this day in 1929, Ursula K. Le Guin was born to Alfred and Theodora Kroeber—though you wouldn’t know it from this article, in which no mention of him having fathered one of the 20th Century’s most influential science fiction writers appears.  Her Wikipedia entry was adapted from a bad student essay, as is evidenced by how thoroughly the narrative of how-I-came-to-learn-this pervades it.

Her mother’s biography of Alfred Kroeber, Alfred Kroeber: A Personal Configuration, is a good source for Le Guin’s early years and for the biographical elements in her late works, especially her interest in social anthropology.

Bully on you, anonymous person, for evaluating your sources.  That said, the aforelinked review ain’t much better.  We’re told:

Alfred Kroeber (1876-1960) is amply known through his works—more than five hundred publications of which eight are books—and he was familiar in varying degrees to students, because he taught at [universities].

I’ve edited out the list of illustrious institutions, but really, I wish I’d been an academic in an earlier era, when such sentences could be published. (Not too early, though—say, Post-Trilling-as-Columbia’s-sole-Jew or thereabouts.) But I digress. Alfred Kroeber, known through his 500 publications and by students, was a proponent of “salvage ethnography.  Here’s a picture of him with Ishi, who claimed to be the last of the California Yahi:

Cultural preservation takes a place of pride in Le Guin’s work, albeit backwardly, via her frequent evocation of cultural obliteration. In her anti-reform novel extraordinaire The Lathe of Heaven, she skewers the idea that society can be changed for the better. All progress, she argues, entails the destruction of a society whose current form is the by-product of an evolutionary process. It may not be a just society, but it’s not an invented one, and thus is far more stable than the proto-totalitarian imaginings of well-intentioned liberals. As Sean McCann and my adviser, Michael Szalay, argue, the novel

offers an all but direct allegory in which a passive aesthetic sensibility comes to replace an illegitimate effort to transform the world through instrumental means. Le Guin’s George Orr discovers that his dreams change the world; almost nightly he has what he calls “effective dreams” that reshape existence. Upon waking, Orr is the only one who recalls what the world used to be like, the only one who realizes that each night his mind refashions the lives of the planet’s billions. Orr turns to government therapists to find assistance in ending his dreams, but is understood instead to be delusional and irrationally afraid of his unconscious. He is thus committed to the care of one William Haber, a state-employed psychiatrist who quickly discovers that Orr does indeed dream effectively, and who then tries to use Orr’s dreams to rid the world of misery. Orr objects, and Le Guin organizes this novel around the ensuing debate between the two men over whether it’s right to change the world . . . .

[But] this kind of idealism comes at a high price. Every time Haber induces Orr to dream a better world, something in Orr resists; when told to solve the color problem, Orr dreams a world in which all are a dull and listless battleship gray; when told to end all human conflict, Orr invents an alien invasion that threatens earth from the sky. Awake, he tells Haber, “it’s not right to play God with masses of people. . . . just believing you are right and your motives are good isn’t enough.” Le Guin’s sympathies are unambiguously with her dreamer, whose resistance to Haber’s megalomania resembles both the New Left’s resistance to traditional politics and the Women’s Movement resistance to the New Left itself. Haber does eliminate the many ills on which he set his sights: he brags to Orr that they have “Eliminated overpopulation; restored the quality of urban life and the ecological balance of the planet. Eliminated cancer as a major killer. . . . Eliminated the color problem, racial hatred. Eliminated war. . . . Eliminated—no, say in the process of eliminating—poverty, economic inequality, the class war, all over the world.” But Orr refuses to grant the importance of these accomplishments because, regardless of the outcome, he doesn’t “want to change things.” These were views consistent with the widely shared sense that technocratic solutions to social problems were invariably misguided. But, like Mailer and many of her contemporaries, Le Guin does not merely worry about the unintended consequences or heedless arrogance of technocratic power; she counters it to what by contrast appears a more fundamental spiritual and political accomplishment—a therapeutic acceptance of reality itself. “We’re in the world, not against it,” Orr responds, “you have to let it be.”

Their treatment of Le Guin (tackled previously) is particularly compelling given what we all hope is the imminent rise of a new technocracy made of Hope and Change and Yes We Cans. I mean, can you believe that? Academic work that’s immediately relevant coming from an English department?  What’s the world coming to?  (And why can’t it arrive sooner?)

"This Nicholas Sandworm anon let flee a fart, as gret as it hadde ben a thundir dent."

(x-p-p-p-posted .)

On this day in 1920, Frank Herbert Jr. was born.  Herbert devoted six years to “researching” what would become the most popular science fiction novel of all time. I’ve always wondered what counts as “research” when writing a novel.  I can understand the need for writers of hard science fiction to familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of a particular field, but for someone like Herbert, wouldn’t “world-building” more accurately describe his efforts?  I say this because Herbert describes a world in which the mysticism and magic have replaced science and technology.

This time I am lifting from Adam Robert‘s excellent History of Science Fiction, in which he claims “one of the book’s greatest strengths is its detailed and plausible rendering of the political context” (236).  What Herbert spent six years “researching,” then, was the complex political environs of the interplanetary empire he’d invented because Dune‘s reputation as an environmental novel is undeserved.  The overgrown extremophiles who inhabit Arrakis are humans from Earth, but somehow survive on a planet with no viable means to create or sustain an atmosphere.  As Roberts writes:

We may wonder, for instance, how Dune’s atmosphere is oxygenated in the absence of planetary vegetation.  In later books Herbert suggests that the sandworms fart oxygen, which hardly address the problem.

Indeed, without an atmospheric density in the neighborhood of 1.2 kg/m³ it wouldn’t matter what element those sandworms farted--it would’ve drifted up and away.  And where did all that sand come from anyway? The most efficient means of producing sand is wave action, but even if Herbert wanted to be inefficient, a little research would’ve taught him that sand requires big rocks and weathering processes.  The geological history of a planet consisting entirely of sand is--will you let me get my geology geek on, please?  The opportunities to do so are few and very far between.  Fine then.  I’ll be mysterious.*

I don’t mean to diminish Herbert’s accomplishments in Dune. So long as he was alive, the series educated science types about the nuances and niceties of medieval politics.  (The process, if not the history.) That said, I always found Herbert’s forecast of future history more than a little pessimistic.  Like the Terminator and Battlestar Galactica franchises, the Dune sextet pivots on a war between man and formerly enslaved machine, the result of which was a return to a pre-computational society.  The mentats are bred--"Fancy meeting you here, dissertation. Please GO AWAY."--they are bred to be mathematical savants, and spice mystically allows for interstellar travel sans star-charts.  So, no computers needed.  However, Herbert’s novels seem to argue that a rejection of the modern technology entails a rejection of modern political systems--as if dispensing with the convenience of a calculator is the first sign of feudalism’s revival.

Besides the obvious problem with this--somehow those Athenians managed to be quasi-democratic before the Age of Apple--and despite Herbert’s obvious critique of hierarchy and messianic thought, I can’t help but think the novels engender a nostalgia for certainty in their readers.  We might not know how spice works, but Our Dear God-Emperor surely does.  (Despite having personally and purposely evolved into a human-sandworm hybrid--about which plot-point my dissertation rears its head like Giant Putin over unsuspecting Alaska. So I’ll stop now lest I invite insanity in, slap it on the back, and offer it a brew--which is, yes, how a body feels about a dissertation recently completed.  I hear tell this subsides in time, but so far I’ve felt none of it.)

 

---

*By which I don’t mean anything like “I sat here trying to think what would have to happen for such a planet to come about--including, but not limited to, a cessation of mountain-building after a period of intense weathering by something other than water, since water poisons the marvelous beasts who produce the spice melange and whose evolution would’ve spanned untold eons.” I don’t mean anything like that.  I know the answer, I’m simply not in the mood to share.

As Abish attests, all American art is alliterative.

(x-posted.)

Not really, of course.  Only if it’s postmodern or romantic, and today it’s romantic.  Edwin Markham’s The Real America in Romance (1909) sought to blend “authentic history and romance … to their mutual advantage.”  His rationale:

Here are set before us the examples of great men of earth, men great in their patriotism and self-sacrifice; and side by side with them are romantic characters typical of the times, men and women only less great in their kindliness and unselfishness, all affording a high expression of the art of Anglo-Saxon romance. Instead of reading about historical characters and events, we see the persons themselves in action, and live with them through the events of their day and generation. The reader loses himself in the irresistible fascination of the story, and the impressions resulting are made on the heart as well as on the intellect.

You do not merely read about Columbus: you endure with him his hardships, share with him his disappointments, rejoice with him in his achievements. You actually feel the thrill of discovery when the New World swims into his vision. Not content with telling you merely that Washington wintered and suffered at Valley Forge with his army, the author takes you straightway into the camp, shows you the torn and bleeding feet of the soldiers, and makes you stand watch with the half-fed sentries, with little to warm your blood except a fiery determination to die of cold, hunger, or British bullets, rather than give up the fight for your country.

That’s a single paragraph in the original, but I’ve sliced it up 1) because it’s overlong, and 2) to emphasize a rhetorical shift from “the reader” to “you.” What opens as a theory of literary affect quickly pivots into admonishment — the reader who doesn’t endure, share, rejoice, winter, suffer or stand watch isn’t merely a bad reader but unpatriotic.  “If you have fail to empathize with those who fought ‘for your country,’” Markham as much as says, “you’re a terrible American.”  He never considers a reader might withhold sympathy not because he or she possesses a paucity of patriotism, but because his bathetic prose betrays an ear unworthy of enthused encomium.  Consider the first sentence of Volume IX, The Stars & Stripes:

A band of boys was abroad in the streets of Boston.

But Scott, you say, happy accidents have happened heretofore! Granted.  Now consider the first two sentences of the second paragraph:

But it was not mirth nor mischief that brought them forth to throng the streets.  So much might have been inferred from their eager and excited talk as they hurried over the flagging, covered thinly with snow.

Those alliterative pairs — “mirth nor mischief” and “eager and excited” — bespeak a deliberately alliterative aesthetic agenda.  Still don’t believe me?  Turn to the twenty-first page and proceed to ponder this passage:

Then the people, or such of them as did not feel the restraint of the more orderly element, rose in riot.  The answer to the riot came in the shape of red-coated soldiers, two regiments of them, under Colonel Dalrymple; and the appointment of hated Hutchinson, Tory townsman, as lieutenant-governor.  [...]  Now the tension of nearly two years had been drawn taut within three days, and peace thus strained had snapped.

The last phrase — “peace thus strained had snapped” — demonstrates why authors aim alliterative for effect.  (My last sentence, not so much.)  It is, in fact, a rather awesome example of alliterative effect: the initial “s” links both words, but the long diphthong of “strain” enacts a straining snapped by the short monothong of “snapped.”  However, since Markham’s every sentence subsists on said diet, this felicitous phrase fails to find favor.

The reader turned off by Markham’s abusive alliteration isn’t unpatriotic per se, merely in possession of refinement and taste.  But if the above hasn’t convinced you of Markham’s “talent,” try this:

With a whoop, the band broke toward the sentinel.

“Kill him!” they cried.  “Kill the bloody-backed scoundrel!”

They fell to pelting him with snowballs.

“The lobster is going to fire!” cried the lads, pressing closer.

What happens when you pelt lobsters with snowballs?  Death or Fafblog.

Brain-damaged historians

(x-posted.)

Somewhere in Silas Weir Mitchell's voluminous correspondence on the brain damage of Civil War veterans—my notes are in California, I'm now in Texas—is an account of a Confederate soldier whose bullet-struck head recoiled into a dry-stone wall and performed a fortuitous auto-trepanation.  The insult to his brain had been mitigated by the hole in head, but Mitchell feared the soldier would never regain normal cognitive function.  As time tripped over nothing, cursed in tongues, begged passersby for aid and, roundly rebuffed, stumbled on, the soldier slowly found himself again.  Eventually he could move, see, speak, form new memories and remember the old ones.  He was as he'd been before the war, but for the brutal fact he saw in still life:   

The dog is across the room curled before the fire. 

Blink. 

The dog is on its hind legs staring out the window. 

Blink. 

The dog is in the middle of the room facing him. 

Blink. 

The dog is sinking its wet nose into the crook of his arm. 

Blink.

The dog is across the room curled before the fire.

The soldier suffered what we now call akinetopsia or motion blindess.*  The effect represented by crude blinks above is better, if more crudely, represented about 5 minutes and 14 seconds into this clip, which captures the fear and paranoia Mitchell assumed would accompany akinetopsia.  Items like fans would be particularly disturbing because they produced a constant impression upon the skin by a process undetectable to the patient, for whom the blades would jump—jump—jump instead of spinning.  But Mitchell was less concerned with akinetopsia itself than one of its side-effects: the ghostly motion trails produced by items in motion. 

Stand before a motion-blind person, do a jumping jack, and he will describe two scenes: a first in which your arms are at your sides, and a second in which your arms stand solid above your head, but are followed by a faint trace of the space they traveled, like the long exposure photograph on the right (original) only far less pronounced.  Mitchell believed these traces might be related to what would have been his crowning achievement were it not for Charlotte Perkins Gilman: phantom limb syndrome. 

Normal brains need not speculate as to how your arm moved from Point A to Point B because it registered Points A.001 up through A.999; that is, it receives sequential sense impressions of your arm as it travels from hips to head.**  A motion-blind brain only receives sensory impressions from Points A and B, but because it knows arms must move through space, it compensates for what it can't perceive by drawing diaphanous snow-angels in the air.  It does so, Mitchell believed, because even damaged brains know how they ought to behave.  They know what stimuli they should be receiving and, in their absence, choose to receive them anyway.  For Mitchell, the brain is but a forlorn lover refusing to acknowledge its loss: lop off an arm at the elbow and it will insist on clenching former fingers in an invisible fist; chop off a leg above the knee and unreal calves will burn with the exertion of a marathon completed. 

The ghostly trails seen by the motion-blind are simply a different manifestation of the same stubborn insistence Nothing has Changed and Everything is Under Control.  The brain insists on stasis while compensating madly, all the while praying the mind never notices its frenzied machinations.

Sometimes it does. 

Every time it steps into the city it does.  Imagine being motion-blind on a bustling street corner with hundreds of vehicles teleporting blocks, their trails overlapping and intermingling with those of trucks turning left, cabs turning right, pedestrians hustling, pigeons scattering, garbage flying, dust rising, wind whipping, rain falling.  The mind becomes exhausted by the brain's exertions.  Put differently:

The brain finds it difficult to confabulate in real time when presented with minimal stimuli.  Offer it a highly trafficked Philadelphia street corner and it performs like a self-taught cook in a trendy restaurant: the first few orders trickle in and go out fine, but as more people arrive and more orders come in, less time is spent preparing more food until what little goes out tastes of shit.  Given foreknowledge of what would be ordered by whom when, our home-schooled chef might could prep himself into something resembling competent; that is, if presented with a narrative, an adequately prepared amateur might survive evening service by remembering the broad strokes. 

Because for Mitchell, narrative is all that stands between us and tastes of shit.  The historian is kin to our overwhelmed chef, our motion-blind pedestrian, our auto-trepanned soldier attempting to relate what happened without the benefit of an overarching narrative.  The historian not only tries to document Points A.001 through A.999, he interleaves a marching causality of the insignificant and irrelevant until the Real Reasons and True Character of historical actors are swamped by waves as pointless as they are ceaseless.  What does a person learn from such history?

If it looks and sounds like a horse, it's probably a zebra. 

The only way to be sure people recognize a horse when they see one is to tattoo the concept on their brain in stirring historical romances of crystalline moral intent and transparent moral purpose.  The historian who subdivides unto infinity produces a history equivalent to the blurred image of the motion-blind.  Why recreate in prose the muddle of a brain insulted?  To try and replicate the exertions of a healthy brain is to court inevitable failure. 

Better to replicate the brain-smoothed illusion of movement lost to the motion-blind via a historical romance about How Great George Washington Was.***

---

*Current medical literature focuses on "L.M.," whose infamous daily horror is knowing when to stop pouring liquids.  She sees (1) a full pitcher, (2) the pitcher titled over a cup, an icicle suspended from its lip, (3) an empty pitcher, an overfull cup, and a table covered in quiet puddles.  I didn't say it was infamous because it was particularly compelling.  Because it isn't.  (Even though everyone cites it as if it were.)

**I know A.0011, A.0012, A.oo13 and their infinite kin prevent turtles from ever crossing finish lines, Achilleses from ever overtaking turtles, puppies from ever escaping alligators or whichever mammalian-reptilian mathematical NASCAR you fancy, but bear with me.

***Before you berate me for my conclusions not following my premises; my science being applied here in this way, there in that; or my nonsensical application of early neuroscientific theories of mind to judgments concerning the relative merits of history proper and historical romance—before you cudgel me for all that, remember Mitchell was a gentleman given to public pontification, not Hegel.

Knowing the rest of the story is half the battle

The reason I'm an historicist instead of an historian—besides the obvious, like being in an English department—is because I'm a bit of a romantic when it comes to my history.  For example, to appropriate a line from (of all things) Elizabethtown, I'm a connoisseur of first looks.  When, I ask myself, did this figure of future historical significance first enter the national consciousness?  Who, for example, is buried in this paragraph from the 30 July 1967 edition of the LA Times?

The flames quickly spread to the hangar deck ... setting off bombs, rockets and other ordnance, while touching off many jet planes, all of which were fully loaded with fuel and heavily laden with ordnance. 

You can almost picture him in one of the "many jet planes," "bombs, rockets, and other ordnance" exploding around him; but as of 30 July he has no name, no face.  For the moment, this anonymous pilot sits alone, as yet undisturbed by history, on the burning pitch of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the Tonkin Gulf. 

The next day, the New York Times provided a fuller, albeit tentative, account of the fire that took the lives of more than 130 US sailors:

For some unknown reason, a plane parked near the carrier's island, midway up the 1,045-foot flight deck, experienced an "extreme wet start."  This malfunction, comparable to what happens when a cigarette lighter is ignited after having been filled too full, occurs about once a week on attack carriers, but almsot never so severely as as it did yesterday.

A thick tongue of flame lashed backward from the parked jet, igniting a missile on one of the dozen or so planes parked near the fantail, their engines turning over in readiness for a strike launching scheduled for 11 A.M.

The rocket "shot across the deck," Captain Beling said, "and by a quirk of fate smashed into a fuel tank under a plane on the port side."

No one aboard the Forrestal seemed to know today which plane the missile had hit — but it was probably either the Skyhawk whose cockpit was occupied by Lieut. Comdr. John S. McCain 3d or the one immediately to his right.

He is become historical, mentioned by name in the paper of record. 

Not that this is the first time his name has appeared, as the father and grandfather with whom he shares it appear regularly in Vietnam and WWII reportage; but this is our first glimpse of the man who will lose to Obama in November—alone, almost exploded, surrounded by the agonized screams of the likely dead.

What can I say?  I'm like Paul Harvey.  (Only macabre.)

Dear John Carlos Rowe: SHUT UP!

Some of us don't have tenure yet.  This is completely uncalled for:

In Connecticut Yankee, Twain warns the reader that the United States is already following the lead of the European imperial powers, a message he would repeat with growing volubility in his anti-imperialist writings from 1898 to 1905, most of which require little interpretation.  (Literary Culture and U.S. Imperialism, 139, emphasis mine.)

You are an evil liar, John Carlos Rowe.  You may have total recall.  You may be right charming.  I may even respect you mightily.  That changes nothing.  This is beyond the pale.  Don't believe me?  Ask anyone without tenure and brace yourself for a brutal what for.  Fact:

Everything requires loads of interpretation.  All of it.  (Even that.)

Just because you have tenure doesn't mean you can give up the gig.  Some of us still have to slog through six sets a night.

Because I'm All Out of Clever Titles, I Christen Thee "History & Literature"

Eric and Ari's discussions about how to best incorporate literature into history classroom inverts the problem I face when designing a syllabus: "How do I demonstrate the significance of a novel outside the context in which it acquired its importance?"*  I feel compelled to contextualize for reasons best understood by the example of Huck Finn.  Consider Huck's classic epiphany in Chapter XXXI.  He's written a note informing Miss Watson where she can find her runaway slave, only to

get to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he's got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I'd got to decide, for ever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

"All right, then, I'll go to hell"—and tore it up.

The reader's annoyance with Huck dissipates because Twain allows them to participate in his recognition of shared humanity.  Twain yokes together those clauses with semi-colons, crafting a sentence like a cartoon snowball on a mountaintop.  With a gentle nudge, he tips it down the mountainside, and minutes later everyone cheers as two stories of packed snow smashes into prevailing wisdom.   

Students cry when they read this passage.  They talk of Huck's heroism in voices trembling with patriotic pride:

"How brave!  For this boy to forsake the only moral order he has known!  'And a child shall lead them!'  How brave of Twain to condemn the South in this manner!" 

I allow them to talk in this vein for a couple of minutes, then ask them to open their book to the title page and read what it says below the title:

Then I ask them when it was published.  They don't know what to make of any of it.

"It was written twenty years after the end of the Civil War," I say.

Blank stares.

"That means slavery had been abolished two decades earlier."

Blank stares.

"How brave would it be to condemn Hitler now?"

Little bulbs appear above a few heads.

"How brave would it have been to condemn slavery after it had been abolished?"

Now they get it. 

How a work relates to the historical moment it represents is crucial interpreting its meaning.  Huck Finn would've been a different novel had it been written in 1844.  It would've been the braver novel the students ardently desire it to be.  It would be another novel still were it written in 2004, especially if it kept the conceit of having been written in 1884 about events that took place in 1844.  The question I would pose to Ari and Eric—the one I fumbled here—would be whether they're more concerned with how a work represents or embodies the ethos of a particular historical moment.   

The Killer Angels says more about what people thought about Gettysburg in 1975 than the battle itself: its representation of the battle tells us about what passed for realism in the 1970s, i.e. how the grit of 19th Century American English was presented, how much of the ubiquitous grime of 19th Century America was preserved, &c.  [Edited because it'd been a long, long day.]

---

*Table questions about The Great Western Canon for the moment.

The Spoils Of Empire Are Not Tax-Deductible

The phrasing is a wee misleading.   The settlement's neither on behalf of nor against the Ottoman Empire.  The culprit is the insurance company New York Life, but its legal and press teams thought it best to name the settlement after the Ottomans.  New York Life merely refused to disburse life-insurance payments to the families of the 2,400 NYL policy-holders killed in the Armenian Genocide. 

Who would want to claim "New York Life Insists It Need Not Honor Policies Purchased By The Victims Of Genocide Settlement Payments" when they could appear imperial?  Certainly not this California tax-payer.

New Goal in Life:

To be the first person to cite an article from Homing News and Pigeon Fanciers' Journal in a dissertation submitted in an English department.*

---

* Francis Galton's "Notes on Fitting Normal Curves to Distributions of Speeds of Old Homing Pigeons" (6 April 1894): 159-60.  That my discussion will focus on the shuffleboarders of the homing pigeon community is pure gravy.  Sadly, no one has thought to upload the "PASSENGER PIGEONS!" scene from Ghost Dog and my copy is VHS, so this is the most pigeon I can muster.

The Mann Act? Really?

[I meant to post this on Edge of the American West, but Eric and Ari neglected to give me the admin privileges I so richly deserve, so I'm stuck posting it here.]

According to the Wall Street Journal, Governor Spitzer will be charged with violating what is popularly called the Mann Act, but which Congress passed as the White Slave Traffic Act.  It was designed to  "regulate interstate commerce and foreign commerce by prohibiting the transportation therein for immoral purposes of women and girls, and for other purposes."  That the bill prohibits transportation for "immoral purposes" and "other purposes" is as problematically vague as you suppose.  Shortly after its passage, the Virginia Law Review voiced its concern that those phrases grant:

the statute such sweeping comprehensiveness as to include every form of conduct contrary to good order. 

Or as the New York Times put it:

GIVES WIDE SCOPE
TO WHITE SLAVE LAW
_____
Supreme Court Holds That the
Act is Not Limited to Com-
mercialized Vice.

________
INCLUDES ESCAPADES ALSO

The Act not only included escapades, it threatened to criminalize all larks, shenanigans, antics, frolics, capers, flings, and high jinks—at least as practiced by the citizenry.  Because the very same ambiguity allowed ideologues in police departments and district attorney offices to prosecute anyone and everyone for anything and everything.  The first person arrested under the act, heavy-weight champion Jack Johnson, was charged with consorting with his white wife shortly after defeating "The Great White Hope" in "The Fight of the Century" in what is most certainly a coincidence.  (Also coincidental: the judge who presided over Johnson's case was none other than Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who while serving as the commissioner of Major League Baseball, blocked the sale of teams to owners who would integrate their roster.)

As H.L. Mencken noted, this expansiveness was a feature, not a bug:

It was carried through Congress, over the veto of President Taft, who discerned its extravagance, on the plea that it was needed to put down the traffic in prostitutes; it is enforced today against men who are no more engaged in the traffic in prostitutes than you or I. Naturally enough, the effect of this extension of its purposes, against which its author has publicly protested, has been to make it a truly deadly weapon in the hands of professional Puritans and of denouncers of delinquency even less honest. "Blackmailers of both sexes have arisen," says Mr. Justice McKenna, "using the terrors of the construction now sanctioned by the [Supreme] Court as a help—indeed, the means—for their brigandage. The result is grave and should give us pause."

Lest you think Mencken's merely grinding another of his innumerable axes, in 1936 the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology comforts its readers with this balm salve:

Although many believe the "Mann Act" has become a dead letter through the policy of non-enforcement, a recent statement by J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigations, shows that this is not true.  He said: "During ... the month of June, 1936, there were more convictions for the violations of the White Slave Traffic Act than in any month during the past three years."

What does all of this mean for Spitzer?  I don't know.  Maybe some of you legal types know how the Mann Act works behind the scenes.  It obviously could be used to coerce testimony from someone.  (The Times didn't dub it "the Encouragement of Blackmail Act" for nothing now.)
 

This Is How Very Important He Was

Whenever I tell people I'm working on Herbert Spencer, they tilt their head and ask:

"What does The Faerie Queen have to do with American literature?"

"Absolutely nothing," I reply.  "I'm working on Herbert Spencer, not Edmund."

"Who was Herbert Spencer?" 

"Only the single most important intellectual force of the Nineteenth Century."

"If you say so."

And I do.  Because he was.  Only I can't prove it fast enough to prevent their attention from drifting to more significant matters.  (Like their work.)  Now I can.  Here, reprinted in its entirety, is an article from the front page of The New York Times (6 December 1903):

He was the Britney Spears of his time!  Except instead of being a useless pop singer, he was an Intellectual Titan!  Two days earlier—and also on the front page—the Times had reported:

The question, of course, is "For whom is Spencer's condition causing 'grave anxiety'?"  The answer is, well, everyone.* 

Point being, HERBERT SPENCER WAS SO IMPORTANT THE TIMES PUBLISHED A FRONT PAGE ARTICLE SAYING HE HAD HAD A BAD DAY SO STOP LOOKING AT ME FUNNY AND TALKING ABOUT THE FAERIE QUEEN ALRIGHT?