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A shout-out to Lord Byron for finally telling my side of the story.
Also,
Romantic Poets: The Musical Interlude
I can't think of one for poor Keats. :(
Thank Urizen you didn't link to ELP's version of Jerusalem...
Personally, I like Blake a lot, but I agree with Samnell - can be hard going (especially the prophetic books). It helps if you can get hold of the illustrated books, which are gorgeous - Dover released a complete edition, but it's not super cheap by any means...
Before I go, here's The Fugs' version of How Sweet I Roamed. Why not, eh?
Uh oh, this is turning into the music thread!
Never bothered with the prophetic books. Loved Songs when I was 16. Read it again a couple of years ago. It was okay.
Allen Ginsberg, of course, once had a vision of Blake as he was masturbating that served as some kind of epiphany that guided him for the rest of his life.
Poets...
Anyway, we all know that poetry is self-indulgent, petty-bourgeois individualist nonsense.
I recently read Empire Defeated: The Vietnam War: Lessons for Today by British commie Peter Taafe. Even though he is a long-standing maddog Trotskyite crypto-fascist, he still said nice things about me. [Blushes]
Then I read Marxism and Darwinism, a small 30-page pamphlet by Dutch "council communist" Anton Pannekoek.
After that I read a children's book about that dashing young Argentinian, Che Guevara. My mother has spent her life working for the school library department and it has affected her reading habits, but she did, at the age of 59, start reading about communism.
After that I went and finished Ain't I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism by Bell Hooks, whose name I am capitalizing because I am a racist patriarchalist!
Now I'm going to go finish off The Hunger Games.
Just finished Gail Carriger's Blameless.
Just started Michael Swanwick's The Iron Dragon's Daughter.
Anyway, we all know that poetry is self-indulgent, petty-bourgeois individualist nonsense.
Mayakovsky'll haunt you!
All that avant-garde stuff is for the birds!
The only good art is socialist realism, with strong, healthy collectivized farmers riding tractors!
Hold on a second...
My order came in, so I commenced David Potter's The Impending Crisis: America Before the Civil War today. And by commenced I mean "read fifty pages in a single sitting with one brief break to get up and get a Coke." Pretty good for a nonfiction work written 35 years ago by a dude born before my grandfather. I got recommendations from a couple of historians for it, but "must read" and "great history" don't necessarily mean "good read". I'm not tearing the pages up but the writing is really solid and has already given me an additional way to look at antislavery politics.
All of this over ground I just covered in my last history reading and my recent writing too.
You've been quite busy. Time to read up, methinks.
Hey Sam, your webpage is awesome and everybody should read it.
Also, if you private message me your home address I will try to get you a present before the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.
True socrealistic building!
At the risk of further confusing the books and music thread, more socialist realism.
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Hey Sam, your webpage is awesome and everybody should read it.
Thanks, Doodlebug. Only took about three years of on and off suggesting by friends for me to finally start the thing. :)
*clears throat*
Step right up! Posts every weekday. Endorsed by Doodlebug. Grows your mind and all the parts of your body you want to grow. Even does dishes and mows the lawn. Why aren't you reading Freedmen's Patrol? Be the first on your block!
At some point, I'm going to find Glad Day by Mike Westbrook on Youtube and link to it on the music thread, so you can gorge on Blake poems with a chunky '70s Brit-Jazz backing until it dribbles out of your ears.
Meanwhile, three cheers to Samnell for his blog - great stuff, and a good introduction to an area of history about which I know 0. My lawn remains unmown despite visiting it, however :)
Part 1 of The Wonder That Was India has been polished off - my parents gave me all my old Michael Moorcock paperbacks when I saw them over Xmas, so I'm having a go at Phoenix In Obsidian before moving onto Part 2.
Meanwhile, three cheers to Samnell for his blog - great stuff, and a good introduction to an area of history about which I know 0.
Not to detract from Samnell's awesomeness, but, you may find this interesting:
"In 1976 a delegation of historians from the Soviet Union visited the United States to participate in commemorations of the bicentennial of the American Revolution. Upon their arrival, a local host asked them which sites they would like to visit first. He assumed that they would want to see Independence Hall, or perhaps Lexington and Concord, or Williamsburg and Yorktown. But the answer was none of the above. They wished to go first to Gettysburg. The host--a historian of the Revolution and the early republic--was dumfounded. Why Gettysburg? he asked. Because, they replied, it is the American Stalingrad--the battlefield in America's Great Patriotic War where so many gave the last full measure of devotion that the United States might not perish from the earth."
from the Preface to James M. McPherson's Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War
On the other hand, I wish I had a copy of Phoenix in Obsidian.
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That could be arranged...
Don't like reading fiction when I'm out and about, so am dipping into Angela Davis' If They Come In the Morning on my way to and from work as a rest from Moorcock.
Angela Davis as a rest from Moorcock, If They Come In the Morning
Angela Davis as a rest from Moorcock, If They Come In the Morning
Angela Davis as a rest from Moorcock, If They Come In the Morning.
And yes, I do have a mental age of 12, thankyou for asking.
Meanwhile, three cheers to Samnell for his blog - great stuff, and a good introduction to an area of history about which I know 0. My lawn remains unmown despite visiting it, however :)
Lawns are a Confederate plot. Fight the Lawn Power! :)
Don't be shy if you've got questions. People who don't know a lot about the era are my intended audience.
Just finished The Iron Dragon's Daughter by Michael Swanwick.
Gonna start The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman.
Meanwhile, three cheers to Samnell for his blog - great stuff, and a good introduction to an area of history about which I know 0. My lawn remains unmown despite visiting it, however :)Lawns are a Confederate plot. Fight the Lawn Power! :)
Don't be shy if you've got questions. People who don't know a lot about the era are my intended audience.
Thanks - I wonder if people saw it at the time as a continuation of the old Cavaliers vs Roundheads/Whigs vs Tories conflict? I have a vague memory of someone trying to have a pop at the South by re-doing 'Lilibulero'... However, this may not be (is not?) the correct thread for my history queries.
Back to the subject in hand, I've finished Phoenix in Obsidian (so it's yours if you want it, DA), and am not particularly enjoying If They Come in the Morning - hasn't aged well. Stealer of Souls here we come!
I have seen comparisons to Cavaliers once or twice, not sure if I remember Roundheads ever getting mentioned.
But, you'll dig this: the only two books that John Brown owned were The Bible and a biography of Oliver Cromwell.
Vive le Galt!
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Thanks - I wonder if people saw it at the time as a continuation of the old Cavaliers vs Roundheads/Whigs vs Tories conflict? I have a vague memory of someone trying to have a pop at the South by re-doing 'Lilibulero'... However, this may not be (is not?) the correct thread for my history queries.
Probably a few did. The white South had a very strong strain of romantic historicism. The second or third bestseller in the decade before the war was Ivanhoe. (Numbers one and two or three are the Bible (KJV) and a large collection of proslavery writings.) A kind of backward-looking, romantic, extremely elitist anglophilia was the trademark of the South Carolina slaveholding class and it also had some adherents in Virginia. Further west tended to have a more white male egalitarian style in the Andrew Jackson mold.
Now that I'm thinking on it, the antebellum era has at least an interesting parallel. The Whig party ideologically preferred the centrality of Congress, to the point where they once contested a presidential election with three or four different candidates in the hopes of denying them all an electoral college majority and thus throwing the election to the House. They distrusted the presidency as it had developed into a position of greater power and authority, especially under Andrew Jackson. (The Whigs started as a We Hate Andy Jackson club.)
The Whigs believed in a fairly activist state that built infrastructure and so forth, but they were also a fairly parochial party that inherited a lot of New England puritanism and the consequent busybody meddler attitude towards the lives of their neighbors. It was a major factor in their becoming the more antislavery of the two parties and also briefly confounded their descendant movements in the 1850s: The Republicans and the Know-Nothings. Many antislavery men, though not Lincoln or Seward, saw slaves, slaveholders, and Irish and German Catholics as inherently sinister threats to the purity of the body politic. For a brief period, anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic politics threatened to knock slavery off center stage but the overlap of the two and the Republicans playing better politics meant that the Know-Nothings ended up merged with the GOP and getting almost nothing out of the deal.
It's not an exact thing, but Puritanism & Parliament with a sort of propertied elitist tone does sound a bit Roundheaded.
Of course the contexts are very different. Whiggery's distrust of the executive had a lot to do not just with their origins as an anti-Jackson party but also how they tended to lose presidential elections, winning all of two.
Funny thing about that. Both Whigs who won the presidency died in office: William Henry Harrison after thirty-one days and Zachary Taylor after sixteen months. In both cases a vice-president with rather different politics took over. John Tyler was barely a Whig at all and the party expelled him shortly after he took office. Millard Fillmore, one of America's least notable presidents, abandoned his dead boss's major policies completely and thus either slowed or sped up the progress toward Civil War by getting the Compromise of 1850 through. (It depends how you count and how seriously you rate the South's threats in 1850.) He got the second-best turnout ever for a third party presidential candidate when he ran as a Know-Nothing a few years later.
I read Seward's Higher Law Speech today. I wussed out and read a transcription instead of the tiny print on the scanned pages of the Congressional Globe (which is what I used for one of David Wilmot's speeches) but it is something I read and it has something that might amuse DB and it's not really the blog's beat at the moment. So here goes:
Slavery has, moreover, a more natural alliance with the aristocracy of the north and with the aristocracy of Europe. So long as slavery shall possess the cotton-fields, the sugar-fields, and the rice-fields of the world, so long will commerce and capital yield it toleration and sympathy. Emancipation is a democratic revolution. It is capital that arrests all democratic revolutions. It was capital that, so recently, in single year, rolled back the tide of revolution from the base of the Carpathian mountains, across the Danube and the Rhine, into the streets of Paris. It is capital that is rapidly rolling back the throne of Napoleon into the chambers of the Tuilleries.
The speech was Seward's maiden voyage in Senate rhetoric, delivered on March 11, 1850 to the general indifference of his peers. But of course he has in mind 1848. In the same speech he calls slaveholders a bunch of lazy, corrupt degenerates. :)
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IIRC, Seward talked a great game and then sold out like a stooge of the plutocracy.
Anyway, there's some pretty interesting history over here. In general, but in particular the second section, entitled "Britain and the Civil War."
IIRC, Seward talked a great game and then sold out like a stooge of the plutocracy.
Anyway, there's some pretty interesting history over here. In general, but in particular the second section, entitled "Britain and the Civil War."
Yeah, Seward started the war trying to get a foreign war going to bring the South back around and seriously complicated the resupply of Sumter. (He wanted to concede it and have the fight, if one came, over a fort in Florida.) Also he generally wanted to be the guy really in charge and maneuvered to become a sort of shadow Prime Minister. Lincoln put him in line, but he was thereafter one of Abe's more reliable supporters in the Cabinet. He kept right on supporting Abe even through the worst decision of the presidency: Andrew Johnson. Seward stayed on and helped him fight Reconstruction.
Yeah, that's what I remember.
A shout-out, again, for Gore Vidal's Lincoln.
When I pulled that McPherson book out for Limey, I knocked over an old pamphlet by Franz Mehring which I then re-read.
In addition, after rooting through my boxes, I found a copy of Engels's The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in an old, falling apart edition of Marx and Engels Selected Works that was owned by one Edgar Stillwater in 1952. I started reading it again, but decided it was too close to falling apart, so I ordered it from the library and got a 1972 edition with a 60-page preface by one Eleanor Burke Leacock. So, now, at least I am reading anthropology that is only one century out of date, instead of two!
Just finished The Half-Made World by Felix Gilman. A weird west tale where the pioneers are literally on the edge of creation. The industrial demon-possessed railroad engines of The Line war against the demon-possessed agents of The Gun.
Just started Ghost Story by Jim Butcher.
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Kim Stanley Robinson Red Mars.
Midgard Campaign Setting until I'm able to mosey my way down to the bookstore to pick up Memory of Light.
The Hunger Games. First blood.
Just finished Live by Night, by Dennis Lahane; one of his more upbeat books, not that that's saying much. (No, seriously, it's very well written.)
I'm laid up a bit with allergies. It has not been a boon to reading or writing. But for the blog I've taken up a horrifying pseudoscientific article from 1851: Diseases and Peculiarities of the Negro Race.
It's a slog, in part because the only full text I've found is in a massive 700+ pages, 50 MB PDF from Google books that collects an entire volume (about six months' worth) of a Southern journal which did not print the thing in one block. Instead it got split over something like six separate installments. Three times I've thought I had the whole damned thing and had to go back. Then I thought I had all the relevant portions until just tonight. I'm guessing the thing is probably thirty or forty pages in all and the PDF isn't searchable so I have to go hunting manually.
I've also gone through three or four rounds of culture shock in trying to even understand the author's argument since he just assumes all the parts I'd like to have spelled out so I can thoroughly understand before I eviscerate.
The Cardinal's Blades by Pierre Pevel (now finished - bit like a French Captain Alatriste novel, only with extra dragons)
and
The Man in The Iron Mask (in small chunks)
and
Part 2 of The Wonder That Was India. (ditto)
Please tell us something interesting about India, Limey.
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Ram fighting was a popular sport in ancient India
Numerous Indian astrologers and magicians lived in Rome during the Imperial era, and were much sought after. There was a regular trade in slaves and luxury goods between the Roman Empire and South India
Someone hearing a performance on the vina (kinda like a sitar, only with two sound chambers, I think) by a South Indian musician is experiencing much the same thing as a concert-goer would have 1,000 years ago...
An Ethiopian dynasty ruled Bengal for a short while.
Cotton, rice and chicken were first domesticated in the Punjab - the jury's out on the water buffalo, apparently.
War elephants are rubbish. What you want are horse archers, and lots of 'em.
Numerous Indian astrologers and magicians lived in Rome during the Imperial era, and were much sought after. There was a regular trade in slaves and luxury goods between the Roman Empire and South India
If I remember correctly, there even was a small colony* of Roman traders in southern India.
*colony as in 'several people of the same nationality living in the same place' (for instance, there's a Swedish colony in Waterloo in Belgium), not as in 'a community founded to expand a political entity's territory.'
I am nearing the half or Red Mars and I am rather disappointed. Not nearly enough of exploration/colonization procedures to be considered hard SF, not enough representation of astronauts lives, society and politics to be soft/social SF, characters are terribly bland, action is non-existent. The major drama revolves over a woman that can really decide between two men. Maybe later it will got better.
Numerous Indian astrologers and magicians lived in Rome during the Imperial era, and were much sought after. There was a regular trade in slaves and luxury goods between the Roman Empire and South IndiaIf I remember correctly, there even was a small colony* of Roman traders in southern India.
Finding Roman coinage in digs on India's west coast is supposed to be pretty common too.
Ram fighting was a popular sport in ancient India
Numerous Indian astrologers and magicians lived in Rome during the Imperial era, and were much sought after. There was a regular trade in slaves and luxury goods between the Roman Empire and South India
Someone hearing a performance on the vina (kinda like a sitar, only with two sound chambers, I think) by a South Indian musician is experiencing much the same thing as a concert-goer would have 1,000 years ago...
An Ethiopian dynasty ruled Bengal for a short while.
Cotton, rice and chicken were first domesticated in the Punjab - the jury's out on the water buffalo, apparently.
War elephants are rubbish. What you want are horse archers, and lots of 'em.
Whenever I use horse archers, they always drop their arrows all over the place. ;-)
I'd do the same if someone spiked my fodder with tequila :)
You need centaurs, I think. But they, too, tend to drink...
If I remember correctly, there even was a small colony* of Roman traders in southern India.
There've been Jewish communities in India since BCE, too!
Just finished Stay by Nicola Griffith, who has a horrifying habit of writing pastoral scenes with brief asides of the protagonist pondering how best to kill people, and conversations where she thinks, as she's listening, about how easy it would be to kill the person she's talking to. Recommended!
Also Diggers by Terry Pratchett, which I wanted to like, but found disappointingly gender-norm enforcing, and had the angry feminist character being taught the lesson that if she just asks politely, she'll achieve her goals. Uh, sure. Good luck with that.
Now reading Major Pettigrew's Last Stand by Helen Simonson; very soothing. Kage Baker's The House of the Stag is waiting in the wings.
Kage Baker's The House of the Stag is waiting in the wings.
I liked that book and was very saddened that her death brought an end to the series. And, you know, that she was dead.
Getting back into reading after being knocked out of commission by my allergies. I opted for something lighter than the history of the last decade or so before the Civil War and picked up Warm Bodies on the strength of the trailer for the movie. Eighty-five pages in it's silly and funny, a little sweet, and the zombie-POV is a dead-on description of depression.
It's not a major feature so far, but I also appreciate the thought that clearly went into how the zombie apocalypse happened.
So, we're down to three tributes in The Hunger Games, but I've decided to do something not at all in character and that is to watch the movie before I finish the book.
In the meantime I read a pamphlet called Enlightenment Rationalism and the Origins of Marxism which has all kinds of goodies in it. I even think I was present for two of the three published lectures.
I'm also thinking of taking another roll on Tensor's list, or maybe, seeing if I can dig Henry David Thoreau any more than I did Ralph Waldo Emerson.
We'll see.
Finished Warm Bodies and got the voicemail that my copy of A Memory of Light arrived. Time to disappear for a day or so.
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by perennial Samnell-fave Chris Hedges and comic book dude Joe Sacco.
Finished A Memory of Light after two days and four eyestrain-inducing sittings. The number of characters acting like rational adults instead of narcissistic a#!%*##s actually got disorienting. Almost no one was an idiot. Consequently, everyone was out of character in the most pleasant way. Quite a few more resolutions than I expected to actually get, though I wish we got a couple more in the epilogue.
And now back to The Impending Crisis.
Also ended up rereading a goodly chunk of Friedrich Tiedemann's 1836 paper On the Brains of the Negro, compared with that of the European and the Orang-Outang today, for the blog. Surprisingly easy read, considering the English was his second language and the German really shows through a few times.