A Magnificent Spectacle





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offers an incisive view of Winston Churchill's life, language, and career. The tone is generally broad minded and admiring, but Ms. Rubin takes care to note Churchill's faults, many of which were the obverse of his virtues. Perhaps no one with less singlemindedness of purpose could have saved Britain during World Ward II, but Churchill also often exhibited a striking unconcern for the feelings or desires of others. Rubin points out that Churchill rose to greatness because he was called upon to oppose Hitler; had the great opponent of his life been Gandhi we might remember him rather differently.

Re-Joyce

Top News Article | Reuters.com

DUBLIN (Reuters) - In the summer of 1924, Irish writer James Joyce sat alone in Paris, took out his notebook and gloomily wrote in it: "Today 16 of June 1924 twenty years after. Will anyone remember this date."

Two years had passed since Joyce had published his epic novel "Ulysses" and things were not going well.

Despite attracting a small core of devotees, the book had been denounced by the Irish as un-Christian filth, banned in Britain and burned by U.S. censors due to its "indecency."

To Joyce it seemed that June 16, 1904, the day on which the novel is set, was slipping unnoticed into history.

He need not have worried.

Next week, Dublin and the world will celebrate the 100th anniversary of what is now known universally as "Bloomsday" in honor of the central character of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom.

Bread

I owe my best friend an apology for ever suggesting that baking bread is not very interesting. Step by step, I am learning to make bread with . Tonight I baked my first sourdough loaf, after preparing the sourdough starter over the course of the past week. Beard's book is simple enough to be easy to follow but complete enough to address unexpected problems or questions. Among my ambitions are rye bread, whole wheat bread, and Moroccan loaves.

Sea Stories

I finally got to see the video of tonight after my wife rented it for me. She thought the characters as portrayed in the movie were two-dimensional, except the young midshipman Lord Blakeney. Clearly, the real stars were the ships. I still look forward, perhaps more than ever, to reading which I haven't quite reached in Patrick O'Brian's series. From what I recall of , which admittedly I read years ago, the movie must owe most of its action to the Far Side of the World. Perhaps, though, I need to revisit Master and Commander?

Manchester Remembered

washingtonpost.com: Author of Military History William Manchester Dies

William Manchester, 82, whose riveting books about men in military and political life made him one of the greatest popular historians of the 20th century, died June 1 at his home in Middletown, Conn.

His slow death, after two strokes, brought a poignant end to one of the most productive and scrupulous writers of best-selling tomes about outsized modern historical figures and contemporary culture.

Fueled by yogurt and brief naps in his office, the sinewy Mr. Manchester could withstand 50-hour writing sessions in his heyday. In recent years, he was grief-stricken by his inability to concentrate even on simple television programs, much less his final, three-volume project, a biography of Winston Churchill. He had to relinquish control of his career-capping work.

"Language for me came as easily as breathing for 50 years, and I can't do it anymore," he told the New York Times in 2001. "The feeling is indescribable."

New Beginnings 2

I first started reading Joyce's 10 years ago when I was too sick to finish it. It seems like a momentous enterprise to take it up again. I'm thinking about reading Richard Ellman's biography of Joyce also, and then maybe rereading Ulysses.

End of an Era

Roger Straus Jr., 87; Founded Preeminent Publishing House (washingtonpost.com)

"Many people have accused me of being an elitist," Mr. Straus once said. "I'm guilty. I am an elitist. I like good books."

In a sense, it may be easy to become a book publisher when your mother is a Guggenheim. Still, based on the obituary in the Washington Post, it is apparent that Roger Straus stood for an older vision of publishing, in which profits were a way to publish great literature and not merely an end in themselves. His vision of publishing seems increasingly endangered as the world of publishing is absorbed into a handful of giant conglomerates, and almost Orwellian (vide 1984) universe where a few vast behemoths dominate the globe, each nominally at war with the other but all dedicated to the preservation of numbing control and uniformity. On a hopeful note, the Post points out that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux continues to publish books reputed to have literary merit despite having been acquired by large German publisher.

Woody

unbillable hours: On Woody Guthrie

Gene Santoro's is on my short list of books to read. The book chronicles the history of modern music, with Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie as central figures. TPB, Esq. at Unbillable Hours notes that another book on Woody Guthrie by Ed Cray is out.

Race and Russian Lit

A mid-twentieth century translation of a nineteenth century classic Russian novel is perhaps the last place one would expect to run across the N-word, much less in the following bizarre context:

A soldier on the march is as much shut in and borne along by his regiment as a sailor is by his ship. However far he goes, however strange, unknown and dangerous the regions to which he penetrates, all about him — just as the sailor sees the same decks, masts and rigging — he has always and everywhere the same comrades and ranks, the same sergeant-major Ivan Mitrich, the same regimental dog Nigger, and the same officers.

Tolstoy,
, tr. Rosemary Edmunds, p. 313. I found the name of the dog to be a minor but shocking revelation in its apparent casual equation of people of African descent with dogs, its casual use of a pejorative for people of African descent as the name of an Army unit's mascot. Although I have heard of such practices in this day and age, they do not generally go unremarked or unchallenged.

In one of the few other references to people of African descent in War and Peace, Natasha and Nikolai engage in an odd reminiscence about having encountered a possibly imaginary Black man at their house:

"And do you remember," Natasha asked with a pensive smile, how once, long, long ago, when we were quite little, Uncle called us into the study — that was in in the old house — and it was dark. We went in and all at once there stood . . . "

"A Negro," Nikolai finished for her with a smile of delight. "Of course I remember! To this day I don't know whether there really was a Negro, or if we only dreamt it, or were told about him."

'He had grey hair, remember, and white teeth, and he stood and stared at us . . . "

"Sonya, do you remember?" asked Nikolai.

"Yes, yes, I do remember something too," Sonya answered timidly.

"You know, I've often asked papa and mamma about that Negro," said Natasha, "and they declare there never was a Negro." But you see, you remember about it."

"Of course I do. I can see his teeth now."

"How strange it is! As though it were a dream! I like that."


id. p. 614[1]


Again, a Black man is a curiosity for Tolstoy's characters, a being so remote that they are not even sure that they did not dream him. The whiteness of his teeth is a familiar racist cliche today.

It seems bizarre that Tolstoy would have introduced these two anomalous references into a 1400-page novel. One of his few other references to the African continent, in which he deplores Napoleon's barbaric slaughter of the Egyptians, does not suggest any particularly strong animus toward people of color. Id. p. 1402. Moreover, he does not comment at all on the American South, which at the time was the other great imperial slaveholding state, along with Russia. (Unlike the American South, however, the Russians did not, as far as I know, import people of color to be slaves.) Still, it is worth remembering that the elegant lives of Tolstoy's Princes and Counts are made possible by the subjugation of thousands of their fellow countryman. (Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is regarded as notably enlightened because he is one of the few aristocrats to liberate his serfs.) Although Tolstoy goes to some length to humanize serfs such as Platon Karayatev, throughout the novel one has the sense that Russian society is able to function only by assuming that the serfs are not fully human. And if the serfs in the novel seem to be not fully human, the Blacks seem even less so. Tolstoy's pair of anecdotes are symptomatic of how deeply ingrained in European (and American) society racial stereotypes have been for centuries, and suggest reasons why we have so much difficulty overcoming them even today.

[1] Of course, it says volumes about Sonya's status as the poor relation to Nikolai and Natasha that she does not really remember this odd incident, and yet feels compelled to pretend that she does.

Music to My Ears

I have been looking forward for some time to Gene Santoro's new book,
, a sweeping account of modern music due out in May.

Free at Last

I released my first book — All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren — through Book Crossing today. I put a label and a bookmark in it and left in on a table at the Caribou Cafe on 17th and L, N.W. in Washington, D.C. When I came back at lunchtime, it was nowhere to be seen. Now I am just waiting to see whether whoever picked it up will make an entry on the Book Crossing site.

Cool Site of the Day


Read and Release at BookCrossing.com... Flipping through PC Magazine, I came across Book Crossing. I was immediately enchanted, not only out of a love of literature but because it reminded me of watching one of my favorite childhood movies, Paddle to the Sea (based on the book by Holling C. Holling). On the bottom of a wood carving of an Indian in a model canoe, carefully ballasted, a boy carved, "Paddle to the Sea - Please put me back in the water." He then cast the canoe into the local river. The movie was about all the people who found the canoe on its journey to the sea, many of whom lovingly repainted and marked the canoe before they put it back into the water. I never knew how much was true, but I loved the movie. Book Crossing, which asks people to "release" books after marking them with an identifying label and number, has the same idea. People who find the book can log onto the Book Crossing web site and leave their comments about the book before giving the book to someone else or leaving it for a stranger to pick up.

19th Century National Prejudices

"Pfuhl was one of those hopelessly, immutably conceited men, obstinately sure of themselves as only Germans are, because only Germans could base their self-confidence on an abstract idea — on science, that is, the supposed posession of absolute truth. A Frenchman's conceit springs from his belief that mentally and physically he is irresistably fascinating to both men and women. The Englishman's self-assurance comes from being a citizen of the best-organized kingdom in the world, and because as an Englishman he always knows what is the correct thing to do, and that everything he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly right. An Italian is conceited because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is conceited because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that it is possible to know anything completely. A conceited German is the worst of them all, the most stubborn and unattractive, because he imagines that he possesses the truth in science — a thing of his own invention but which for him is absolute truth." Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, tr. Rosemary Edmunds (Penguin, 1982), pp. 757-58.

Crit

Jeffrey Tayler holds forth on Bad Peace Corps Writing, and cites Tolstoy as one of his influences. I was particularly struck by Tayler's comment that it is never really possible to "go native," and that writers who claim to have done so invariably strike an inauthentic note. Such pretensions have the misfortune of blinding an author to what is most interesting about another culture — difference.