The Beiderbecke Affair

Last of the Penobscot (UPDATE)

Downeast magazine recently published an article on the Penobscot Indian Nation’s ongoing effort to preserve its native language. The first comment on the story included a link to my own report on the subject, which I originally wrote for the now-defunct Maine Times a number of years ago and then posted on these pages back in 2006. Anyway, Maulian Dana, whose father Barry is quoted in the story, followed the link, read the story, and asked to respond to the piece, which she bluntly described as “crap.”

Fair enough. It’s one of the lesser insults I’ve sustained, as you may already know. Anyway, in this document [pdf], you’ll find Maulian’s comments and my responses. It was a good discussion and I thank Maulian for making the effort to contact me. I wish this happened more often than it does.

(Be careful what you wish for!)

‘I don’t see color’

Several days ago I patched together a few thoughts on race-mixing. The writer Steven Augustine posted a series of comments, arguing that race is in need of a “re-think,” that the term “race” itself is racist, and, finally, that my sister considering herself to be “black” is the product of “proto-Nazi nonsense . . . It’s Eugenics, pure and simple.”

Whew.

A reader responded to Augustine’s thoughts via e-mail:

The argument that “race does not exist as a natural category” makes me SO MAD in part, because it was at the cent of the anthropology curriculum at my college, and made me feel SO stuck (if “culture doesn’t exist, then what the hell are we studying?!) and finally pushed me over the edge. Steve: NOT HELPFUL. But thank you for your comments.

I have a couple thoughts. In Making Whiteness (1998), University of Virginia history professor Grace Hale writes that “identities are slippery, ambiguous, and individual things.” So any discussion of race (or “race,” if you prefer) is necessarily going to be charged because we’re talking about how we identify ourselves. When my sister describes herself and her husband as “the only two black people in a church full of whites,” it hardly matters whether the latest biology asserts that race doesn’t exist. It does for her!

However, Augustine is correct to point out that this identity is on one level arbitrary—all things being equal, she could just as easily identify herself as white. He is also correct to suggest that this identity has, in a way, been forced upon her by history. After all, all things are not equal. In the United States of America, people with dark skin are not and never have been considered white.

Nor, let’s face it, have they necessarily wanted to be.

Central to Hale’s argument is that “racial making,” as she puts it, goes both ways. The idea of whiteness began as a denial of racial identity, but in the years between Reconstruction and the Second World War, an entire infrastructure of white identity was built. And its foundation, of course, was segregation. If whiteness started out as the denial of race, it ended as the denial of blackness.

It’s sad. It’s unfair. But it’s the world we live in, and I welcome the discussion. In the meantime, playing color blind—or arguing that race doesn’t exist—won’t get us very far. Wouldn’t well all like to be like Stephen Colbert, who famously said, “Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me sir”?

Yesterday’s New York Times, for instance, highlights a report on transracial foster care and adoption. Multiracial families don’t produce psychological or social problems in kids, according to the report, but “these children often face major challenges as the only person of color in an all-white environment, trying to cope with being different.”

“The idea of being color-blind is great, and we’d all like to get there,” Adam Pertman, executive director of the Adoption Institute, told the Times. “But the reality is that we live in a very race-conscious society, and that needs to be addressed. We can’t simply pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and leave it up to the child to cope.”

Hear, hear. (Although this strikes me as not necessary at all.) Oh, and as for the issue of eugenics—Virginia has a fascinating role to play in that history. More soon . . .

IMAGE: Anti-miscegenation propaganda

A Modest Salute

My grandfather, Ray Wolfe, was 21 years old in 1917, a farmer from tiny Lost Nation, Iowa, who was drafted into the Navy as the United States prepared for war with Germany. He didn’t go overseas—he was stationed at the Great Lakes, instead—but he served. I admire that.

My sister Bridget served, as well. She was not quite 23 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and, as a newly commissioned officer, she volunteered to go. She also served in Bosnia and, most recently, during the initial invasion of Iraq. She volunteered for this last tour, as well, and I admire that even more.

My grandfather’s brother Melvin was a Marine in the 1920s and 1930s who saw action in Nicaragua, the Philippines, and Shanghai. My grandmother had twin brothers who fought in Europe during the Great War. A cousin was decorated at Pearl Harbor, and an older, more distant relative may have been an Iowa cavalryman in the Civil War.

My mom’s oldest brother fought in Europe during the Second World War, and I have a cousin who just joined the Marines.

Today’s a day for sunshine and brats. But I’ll be thinking of them and their service, too.

PREVIOUSLY: A great picture of Ray and his family

IMAGE: My grandfather’s World War I draft card

It's a Complicated Story (Part 2)

. . . by which I mean race in America.* I know, this is hardly a penetrating insight, but it’s on the mind regardless, what with Barack Obama reminding us that he has “brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents,” and some guy in Georgia responding by creating T-shirts that liken the candidate to Curious George. “This is not 1941 in Alabama,” the dude told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution when confronted with the suggestion that comparing a black man to a monkey might be racist, “so get over it.”

True enough. It’s not 1941 in Alabama. The same guy, though, once created a sign that read, “I wish Hillary had married O.J.,” which suggests that fears of miscegenation have never really gone away. After all, what is O.J. Simpson if not, for some people at least, a kind of Nat Turner, a symbol of the black man rising up not just to murder whites, but white women? Virginian William Styron won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Confessions of Nat Turner, a novel in which the legendary slave-cum-preacher-cum-rebel is sexually attracted to a white woman whom he then murders. African Americans loudly protested.

Sure, he could have loved Margaret Whitehead, the actor Ossie Davis said at the time, but that’s not the point.

What I am disturbed about is that this is one of the areas about which I fear my country can be immediately psychotic and destructive. I have only to think back in the last hundred years to the more than 3,500 black men lynched in the South, the rationale of such activities being that these men constituted a threat to white womanhood . . . Are we that clear of our horror at the thought of a black male lusting after white flesh?

Not according to Cinque Henderson, an African American who wrote in The New Republic this week that “had Barack married a white woman, his candidacy would’ve never gotten off the ground with black people.” Regardless of whether he’s right, what’s interesting is the idea that the fear and skepticism of race-mixing is not limited to whites. Notice how Davis talks about “our horror.” Does his pronoun refer to Americans or just African Americans? He’s not clear, and perhaps that’s the point.

In his 2003 book Mulatto America, Stephan Talty argues that Native Americans were willing, at least at first, to mingle culturally with newly arrived whites. For obvious reasons, however, “the merging of black and white was more contentious.” As early as 1691, Virginia expressed its own skepticism of the idea by banning interracial marriage.

Still, Talty notes that “the ferocious responses to unions of black men and white women that have become a cliché of southern ‘honor’—the lynchings, the castrations, the pathological obsession with black rapists—date mostly from the Civil War period and onward; the institutionalized terror that ruled the South after the war was not the rule.” In fact, he claims that whites often looked out for their black neighbors who might have been unfairly accused, and that, in the end, it was white women and not black men “who bore the brunt of the society’s disapproval when they strayed from their assigned beds.”

Of course, interracial marriages weren’t always the union of black men and white women. Richard Loving was white, his wife Mildred black. When Mildred died this month, she left behind the legacy of Loving v. Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court decision (handed down in 1967, the same year Styron’s novel was published) that banned discrimination in marriage based on race. She was also part of another legacy in Virginia, the “secret” mixing of the races. That provocative adjective “secret” comes courtesy of the New York Times, which wrote on Wednesday about the history of miscegenation in Mildred Loving’s hometown, tiny Central Point, Virginia.

Mixed-race folks have a history of settling there, apparently, making it difficult sometimes to tell the difference between black and white. But then that’s what nosy neighbors and Jim Crow laws were for. “Inside Caroline County, Virginia’s strict laws on segregation applied,” according to the Times. “But when [locals] ventured beyond Caroline County—where no one knew them—many of Central Point’s residents found it a simple matter to ‘pass’ as white.” They could use any movie theater or bathroom or lunch counter they pleased. They could even serve alongside whites in the Army.

“The community developed a system for protecting racial identities of Central Pointers who moved away and married into white families,” the Times continues. “When they took their white relatives back with them to visit, their younger brothers and sisters, who attended the colored school, just stayed home. This was well known to the teachers at the school, who apparently accepted the absences without question.”

Then there were people like Mildred Loving, whose heart forgot to play by the rules, making it impossible for her neighbors to look the other way. Somebody called the sheriff and he rousted her and her new white husband out of bed at two in the morning.

It’s a complicated story, and rarely do these things have happy endings. When my adopted sister—biological mother black, biological father white—married her husband—white mother, black father, then deceased—she remarked that they were the only two black people in a church full of whites. Her voice hinted at both a kind of sadness and something else. Was it victory? I don’t think so. That’s too simple an emotion for Miscegenation Nation.

* This is the second time I’ve posted this image, but only the first time I’ve elaborated.

ELSEWHERE: Cross posted here.

IMAGE: Me and my sis

Mr. Lincoln and the Picketts

I took Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels (1974) off the shelf on Friday and idly opened to the foreword. I’ve always loved how it includes dramatic biographical sketches of the major players at Gettysburg (Longstreet, for instance, is “bearded, blue-eyed, ominous, slow-talking, crude,” while J.E.B. Stuart is a “laughing banjo player” and Jubal Early a “dark, cold, icy man, bitter, alone”). A fact about George Pickett, of Pickett’s Charge fame, caught my eye:

“Received an appointment to West Point through the good offices of Abraham Lincoln, a personal friend, and no one now can insult Abe Lincoln in Pickett’s presence, although Lincoln is not only the enemy but the absolute utterest enemy of all.”

It’s not that I didn’t believe Shaara, but I decided to go in search of confirmation. What I found was Pickett and His Men, a 1913 book by Pickett’s widow, LaSalle Corbell. Shaara happens to mention her as “a girl half [Pickett's] age, a schoolgirl from Lynchburg . . . to whom he has vowed ne’er to touch liquor.” She confirms the Pickett-Lincoln connection and adds this juicy anecdote concerning a knock on the door that came shortly after Richmond fell on April 2, 1865:

“Is this George Pickett’s place?”

“Yes, sir,” I answered, “but he is not here.”

“I know that, ma’am,” he replied, “but I just wanted to see the place. I am Abraham Lincoln.”

“The President!” I gasped.

The stranger shook his head and said:

“No, ma’am; no, ma’am; just Abraham Lincoln, George’s old friend.”

Lincoln proceeds to kiss Pickett’s baby while “an expression of rapt, almost divine tenderness and love lighted up the sad face.”

“I had sometimes wondered at the General’s reverential way of speaking of President Lincoln,” Corbell wrote, “but as I looked up at his honest, earnest face and felt the warm clasp of his great, strong hand, I marvelled no more that all who knew him should love him.”

Whew. That’s pretty strong stuff from a Confederate general’s wife. It’s not that I didn’t believe her exactly, but I decided once again to go in search of confirmation. The newspapers of the day did not cover Lincoln’s visit in great detail. “The Richmond papers are, with one exception, non est,” the New York Times reported. As for what sort of folks the president might have been talking to, here is the Times again:

“It is asserted that two or three of the most prominent citizens sought and obtained an interview with Mr. Lincoln during his short stay here. I have been requested not to mention their names.”

Such was Mr. Lincoln’s reputation in the Confederate capital. As it turns out, however, LaSalle Corbell’s reputation would suffer its own blows. Along with Pickett and His Men, she also published in 1913 a collection of letters between herself and the General, and this is where we come full circle:

“In the ensuing decades, the published George Pickett letters became part of the canon of American Civil War literature,” write three scholars in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing (2001). “Numerous historians cited them, and excerpts appeared in anthologies and collections. Michael Shaara mined them for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels, and Ken Burns highlighted them in his 1990 television documentary The Civil War.”

The upshot? She made them all up. Oh, and she probably plagiarized much of Pickett and His Men, too.

Citing the work of University of Virginia historian Gary Gallagher, the authors note that “Gallagher contended that the tone of the published Pickett letters was too flowery and sentimental for the general to have written, and that they appeared to resemble LaSalle Pickett’s many Lost Cause writings. General Pickett had more knowledge than he possibly could have had at the time the letters were written, and his use of ‘black dialect’ was also suspect.”

But did Lincoln pucker up and kiss Pickett’s baby in Richmond? I don’t suppose we’ll ever know for sure.

IMAGE: A Library of Congress image of Mrs. Pickett

Surpassing Fine

I was sitting on my front porch the other morning reading Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner. It was a beautiful morning—clear, warm, breezy—and with my coffee and a decent view of the Blue Ridge, I was in heaven. So it seemed appropriate that I stumbled onto this passage, in which a traveling salesman visits Turner’s master and gushes on the beauty of a Virginia spring.

“No, sir, Mr. Turner,” he was saying, “they is no spring like it in this great land of ours. They is nothing what approaches the full springtide when it hits Virginia. And, sir, they is good reason for this. I have traveled all up and down the seaboard, from the furtherest upper ranges of New England to the hottest part of Georgia, and I know whereof I speak. What makes the Virginia spring surpassing fine? Sir, it is simply this. It is simply that, whereas in more southern climes, the temperature is always so humid that spring comes as no surprise, and whereas in more northerly climes the winter becomes so prolonged that they is no spring at all hardly, but runs smack into summer—why, in Virginia, sir, it is unique! It is ideal! Nature has conspired so that spring comes in a sudden warm rush! Alone in the Virginia latitude, sir, is spring like the embrace of a mother’s arms!”

Another ode to Virginia spring can be found in this 1913 recording (via):

• When It’s Springtime in Virginia – Owen J. McCormack [Mp3]

There’s nothing on the web about McCormack, but it sure sounds like he’s crooning with a Scottish brogue. The sheet music cover, meanwhile, can be found here.

PREVIOUSLY: “And this is precisely what Styron attempts to do in the book: project himself into the mind of a notorious black preacher and murderer . . .”

What Would Willie Do

“He’s an interesting guy, but just about impossible to pin down.” That’s Jonathan Yardley on the now 75-year-old Willie Nelson. Yardley reviewed the new Nelson biography by Joe Nick Patoski in the Washington Post last weekend and found the book, if not Nelson, lacking.

It’s possible that someday a true biography of him will be written, one that discriminates between what is and is not important in his life, that resists the temptations of list-making and tries to dig into the innermost core of this admittedly highly elusive man. Patoski’s book will be an invaluable resource for the person who writes that biography, and not merely because it contains so much ill-digested information. Patoski knows a lot about Nelson’s music and writes about it with sympathy and understanding. If he doesn’t discriminate among factoids, he does discriminate among Nelson’s songs and recordings, and at times his insights are keen. Certainly he is right to pinpoint “Spirit,” Nelson’s superb album of 1996, as a “dramatic shift” in Nelson’s career, taking him back to the simple roots of country music and emphasizing his remarkable guitar playing as well as the “distinctive” piano of his sister Bobbie. “Spirit” is nothing less than a small American masterpiece.

Boy, do I agree about Spirit. Here’s a taste.

• Your Memory Won’t Die in My Grave – Willie Nelson [Mp3]

And here’s one of my all-time favorites, a tribute to Nelson that treats him as he deserves to be treated: as a messiah.

• What Would Willie Do – Bruce Robison [Mp3]

IMAGE: Willie Nelson, Luck Ranch, Spicewood, Texas, 2001 by Annie Leibovitz

On the Voice of Nat Turner

The Civil War is the order of the day at work and, consequently, I am trying to get started on some Civil War reading of my own. At the moment, that includes James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom (whew, this is going to take me all summer!) and William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Turner led a slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831, brutally murdering several dozen white men, women, and children before he himself was captured and hanged. Styron’s book, which is a fictionalized treatment of Turner’s actual confession, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. But over the years, it has generated almost as much controversy as praise. (The author, who died in 2006, was once nearly reduced to tears over the subject.) When friends learn that I am reading the book, they ask not whether I like it but whether I think it’s racist.

No way am I going to try to answer that—a fool’s errand if ever there was one—but I was struck by something I read in the New York Times’ original review of the novel (which ran in two parts, October 3–4, 1967). The “burden” of Styron’s book, the reviewer wrote, “was not a matter simply of slavery, monstrous as that was, but [of] white Americans’ inability to acknowledge the presence of Negroes as people, or to project themselves into any individual Negro’s mind.”

This is precisely what Styron attempts to do in the book: project himself into the mind of a notorious black preacher and murderer, a complicated man surely, but someone about whom we know very little. For instance, it’s always been up for debate among historians whether the confessions actually contain Turner’s own words. As a result, perhaps, the question of voice and identity is alive throughout Styron’s novel.

Echoing those historians who cocked an eyebrow at the sometimes elevated language of the historical confessions, the Times’ reviewer questions “the authenticity of Turner’s inner voice” in the novel, which is told in the first person from Turner’s point of view. “Turner speaks in dialect,” the Times points out. “But he thinks, recalls, recounts in a voice that many readers will think can only be Mr. Styron’s, it is so cultivated, literate, sensitive, and modern.”

But I wonder if that wasn’t Styron’s whole point. Styron’s Turner, after all, is literate and intelligent, and to the complications of communication he is extraordinarily sensitive. He notices how his interlocutor speaks to him in jail in “sloppy patronizing half-literate white-man-to-a-n– tones” but subsequently addresses the court with “eloquence and authority.” He notices that “when a strange white man adopts this florid, familiar manner, and when his listener is black,” trouble is bound to follow. And he notices that for a slave addressing a white man a middle ground is possible between demeaning servility and dangerous backtalk. (”You just got to learn, man,” he scolds his friend. “You got to learn the difference.”)

Of course, these issues are fraught today as they were in 1967 as they were in 1831. Was it a fool’s errand for Styron to take them on? I’m only a quarter the way through, but I don’t think so.

IMAGE: “Discovery of Nat Turner” from 1881. The author of this article points out that, “in stark contrast to descriptions of Turner’s capture in the southern media, here Turner is portrayed in a heroic light: upright, armed, prepared to meet his fate. The dueling images of Turner—as cowardly fanatic or heroic rebel—both drew on cultural assumptions that equated virtue with worthiness to be free.”

For a taste of how the southern media treated Turner’s capture, read this contemporary account from the Richmond Enquirer.

Crepuscule with Molly

In 1957, Thelonious Monk wrote the ballad “Crepuscule with Nellie” to honor his wonderful wife, who was then undergoing surgery for a thyroid ailment. (The tune is one of Monk’s dozen essentials, or so say the folks at Jazz.com, who love, as I do, his recently discovered Carnegie Hall recording with John Coltrane [Mp3].) The title, which translates to “Twilight with Nellie,” is intended to be all nice and cozy—or at least as nice and cozy as a Monk composition can get, Monk compositions being notorious, after all, for their jagged edges and sharp turns.

Which is why I love his decision to use the otherwise obscure word crepuscule. It may mean “twilight,” but its consonants are too jagged and sharp for anything that’s, you know, just pretty. Baudelaire dug this sort of ambiguity, too, and he began his poem “Le Crépuscule du soir” with a reference to the “charming, friendly evening of the criminal” (or “Voici le soir charmant, ami du criminel”). You can find the rest here, but basically it reads like a stern warning to impatient lovers.

And that’s a theme running through this mix. I don’t think I meant for it to, but it works, I guess, since I put these songs together for Molly on the down-on-one-knee occasion of proposing to her. (She said yes.) So you’ll find below all the Carter, Monk, and Conway, all the joy, the pain, and the Betty Davis of love. I know it only too well, and impatient fool that I am, I can’t wait to spend the rest of my life with Molly.

1.  Hello Darlin’ – Conway Twitty

This song starts out innocently enough. It’s charming, even, the way ol’ Conway, with his greased-back hair, comes on to an old love. But by the end, when he’s begging to touch her one last time, it gets all creepy. “Look up, darlin’, let me kiss you,” the man says, and who knows, maybe that sort of thing worked in 1970, when “Hello Darlin’” hit No. 1. Anyway, I kind of enjoy the creepiness. And hearing Conway (né Harold Lloyd Jenkins) sing takes me back to the days of AM radio and to a childhood immersed in Willie, Loretta, and Dolly, the Statler Brothers and George & Tammy. Ahhh, those are the ’70s that I remember . . .

2.  Love, Oh Crazy Love – June Carter with Carl Smith

This is a comedy act as much as it’s a song, as this vintage roll of YouTube suggests. June comes off like a possessed Muppet (to steal from Molly) while her first husband Carl, a.k.a. Mister Country, plays the pre-“Hee Haw” role of hayseed straight man. Keep your ears open for a political reference obscure even for 1954. Mugwump or mugwomp? Such are the questions of little kids and poets:

Mugwomp, she says clearly, I love the sound of mugwomp.
Swamp, hump, humpback, tug, slug, the pilfered sounds
roll in the wake of her tongue, slashed from their moorings.

3.  Sweet Sue, Just You – Freddy Valier’s String Swing Quartet

Here’s an American pop classic (penned by Will J. Harris and Victor Young) recorded by a Norwegian group in Oslo on December 5, 1938. Freddy Valier, it turns out, was born Fritjof Linnaae. The guitar, meanwhile, is heavily influenced by Django Reinhardt and comes from Robert Normann.

4.  Dinah (Take 1) – Thelonious Monk

Understandably, Thelonious Sphere Monk (Pulitzer Prize laureate, by the way) is best known for his own angular compositions, but the way he approached the standards—from Duke to “Dinah”—was never short of startling. On this number, he heavy-breathes his way through the 1925 ditty popularized by Fats Waller (that genius of joie de vivre) and immortalized by Satchmo’s mugging—yet somehow he makes it new again.

5.  Il fait si beau – Vincent Delerm

Since I don’t really speak French and have no idea what he’s saying (something about the weather, I think), I can only guess that a decent way to describe Delerm would be Charles Aznavour + sense of humor, or a chanson on wry, hold the cheese.

6.  Good Taste Tip (No. 1) – The Shangri-Las

Like Linda Lyndell coming up, the Shangri-Las were white girls trafficking (rather successfully) in ’60s R&B. Amy Winehouse might be the modern-day equivalent, although one suspects that she won’t ever cut radio spots on how to impress a man. Wouldn’t it be awesome, though, if she did?

7.  Anti-Love Song – Betty Davis

“Betty was too young and wild for the things I expected from a woman,” Miles Davis said about his wife of one year, née Betty Mabry. “[She] was a free spirit, she was raunchy and all that kind of shit.” Which is definitely true. So Miles divorced the model half his age, and this song, recorded a few years later in 1973, was her sweet revenge. It’s just oh so nasty, that voice of hers mean as a bass line, her persona a bitches’ brew of sex, funk, and soul.

8.  What a Man – Linda Lyndell

You may recognize “What a Man” as the basis for the 1993 hit by Salt-N-Pepa and En Vogue. If you don’t, so much the better, because this 1968 Stax single far outshines the cheesy pop-rap mess it spawned. Still, Cheryl L. Keyes, author of the impressively titled article “Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance” (Journal of American Folklore, Summer 2000), calls the latter version “celebratory” and notes, rather stiffly, that “Salt-N-Pepa praise their significant others in the areas of friendship, romance, and parenting.” How nice. What Keyes fails to note, and what is perhaps ironic considering her paper’s focus, is that the original song was by a white woman crooning on one of the country’s most famous black labels. How’s that for empowerment? How’s that for creating space? Well, anyway, I just think it’s interesting. More interesting, anyway, and certainly less frightening, than seeing S-N-P do their “thang” on “Live with Regis and Kelly.” Ewww.

9.  Shoop – Salt-N-Pepa

Don’t mean to hate on Salt-N-Pepa—although they were the butt of a particularly funny joke in Baby Mama (a joke, it should be acknowledged, that implied only white squares like myself even listen to them anymore). So I’ll admit that I’ve always loved this song. I’m not proud.

10.  Kham Kham – Chérif Mbaw

Mbaw is a Senegalese singer, via Paris, who has toured with Amadou & Mariam and Tracy Chapman. He’s often compared to a young Youssou N’Dour, whose Etoile de Dakar revolutionized West African music back in the ’70s and ’80s. Such compliments can be a mixed blessing, of course, as this review suggests. Still, this is great, soulful stuff.

11.  Born Feeling – Sara Tavares

Speaking of which, here is Sara Tavares. A Portuguese singer whose parents are Cape Verdean immigrants, she started out playing African-American funk and soul but has since come back to her African roots. Hmmm . . . Portugal, Africa, America . . . that hits pretty much all the points of the West African slave trade, the hub of which was Cape Verde. Tavares isn’t obsessed with history, though. “I’d rather stand at the beginning of a new tradition of music of the diaspora,” she says on her website, “of young African immigrants in Europe who don't only look back.”

12.  Them There Eyes – Billie Holiday

This is one of Holiday’s classics, from 1939. The Village Voice describes it best:

With “Them There Eyes,” Billie lays on the rap: flirting with the boy who thinks he is taking the lead. She is by turns first-crush girlish (listen to the pouty way she sings, “My heart is jumpin’, you started something”) and wise in the ways of lovemaking: her “Aw baby!” and “You better watch out” are enough to make the sexual novice tremble with temptation, trepidation, and curiosity. She builds tension with the fast-paced “Ifellinlovewithyouthefirsttime-Ilookedinto” and then releases it with the prolonged “Them . . . there eyes.” The signs of the Lady to come are all there: perfect diction, a drop-dead sense of rhythm, behind-the-beat phrasing.

I would only argue that the Lady was not “to come” at this point. She was already there.

13.  Come Pick Me Up – Ryan Adams

“I wrote this today. It probably sucks.” Blah blah blah. Whatever, Ryan.

14.  Good Taste Tip (No. 2) – The Shangri-Las

The lady says, “Don’t be disappointed that it’s not an expensive bauble or the perfume you’ve been hoping for.” What? Bauble? I love how Mary wraps that Queens accent of hers around the word, but what does bauble mean? Merriam-Webster to the rescue: a trinket, something of trifling appeal. An “expensive” bauble would therefore seem unlikely, but not impossible. Anyway, it turns out that the word was more popular in Shakespeare’s time. A “fool’s bauble,” for instance, was a short stick with a head ornamented with asses’ ears, as in the old proverb, “If every fool should wear a bauble, fewel would be dear.” In Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio sneers at how “this driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole,” a line that set critics like Henry Thomas Buckle abuzz: “The bauble used by fools was a phallus.” Oh my! Wait a minute . . . the Shangri-Las are dirty!

15.  Si tu reviens chez moi – Les 5 Gentlemen

This is bootleg French freakbeat (courtesy of Aquarium Drunkard) and it reeks of full-on rock ’n’ roll desperation. Which, of course, is what makes it so scarily compelling.

16.  Sparkle and Shine – Steve Earle

We saw Steve Earle in Charlottesville a few weeks ago, and he performed with his new wife Allison Moorer, who, let’s face it, is as hot as Earle is not. So I don’t blame him for writing this bauble in her honor, although it reminds me a bit of Lyle Lovett’s “I Love Everybody” [Mp3]. After Julia Roberts, Lovett was never quite the same. I wish better on Earle, who has always lived on the knife’s edge. I Feel Alright was perhaps his best album, and it couldn’t be further away from I Love Everybody.

17.  Bette Davis Eyes – Kim Carnes

We’ve been watching a lot of Bette Davis lately—All About Eve; Now, Voyager!; Jezebel—so I understand now what I didn’t get when this song was first a hit: that Bette Davis eyes are real, something to fear, covet, and respect. (In my opinion, the world needs more Bette Davises and Tallulah Bankheads.) What we have here is an acoustic update, but Carnes took the original to No. 1 in 1981, where it perched for nine weeks, becoming the year’s top song and the second most popular single of the entire decade behind (god help us) Olivia Newton-John’s “Physical.” Okay, Carnes’ wasn’t actually the original. That honor goes to a 1974 recording by Jackie DeShannon, a singer-songwriter who played in a blues band with Ry Cooder and toured with Van Morrison. She’s good people, in other words. (“When You Walk into the Room” [Mp3] is from 1964.)

18.  Both Sides Now – Allison Moorer

I’ve never listened to much Joni Mitchell, so when Moorer performed this the other night, it was new to me. The lyrics are haunting and beautiful (no surprise) and Moorer must have sung them well enough for me to notice and remember. Still, her voice is big; it’s built for full-throated gospel-country shouters and not this fey folkie stuff. “Total crap” is how our neighbor put it. “I just walked out and got some gelato.” I wouldn’t go that far, but I do prefer Miss Fortune (“Hey Jezebel” [Mp3]).

19.  Dickhead – Kate Nash

Nash is a Dublin-born Lily Allen knockoff who (also) sings in a knockoff Cockney accent and has been referred to as “a slutty Regina Spektor.” Which is all fine. I just like how she plays this so straight.

20.  Didn’t I (Blow Your Mind This Time) – The Delfonics

The Delfonics were a soul band from Philly that won a Grammy for this one in 1970. You might have thought that when New Kids on the Block charted with it in 1986 [Mp3] that would have killed the song dead forever. But Quentin Tarantino is something of a Resurrection Man (“Oh father, I should so like to be one when I’m quite growed up!”), making the song a clever point of reference in the unlikely romance between Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) and her bail bondsman Max Cherry (played by the criminally underappreciated Robert Forster).

21.  You Were on My Mind – Jay & The Americans

This one started out in the hands of Ian & Sylvia [Mp3] (ick, honestly), became a huge hit in 1965 for the otherwise forgettable We Five (see them perform it on television), and finally found a decent home with Jay & The Americans, a pop vocal group about which there is little to say that’s interesting. Still, their rendition sounds like a perfect, shiny, unthreatening piece of ’60s art deco. Turn it up and scream, “I got troubles, oh-oh-oh, I got worries, oh-oh-oh!” and no more troubles, no more worries shall ye have.

22.  Sweet Sue, Just You  – The Mills Brothers

Speaking of great vocal groups, the Mills Brothers sang most of their instruments, too. (But I’ve already said that.)

23.  Dinah (Take 2) – Thelonious Monk

Bix Beiderbecke once said he never played a solo the same way twice because he never felt the same way twice. “That’s what I love about jazz,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Do you?” Here’s a classic example of the improvisatory mindset, with Monk digging in to “Dinah” a second time and coming up with something different.

24.  Us – Regina Spektor

Spektor, meet Shelley and Baudelaire . . .

They made a statue of us
Our noses have begun to rust.
Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
We’re living in a den of thieves,
Rummaging for answers in the pages.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Et l’homme impatient se change en bête fauve.

ADDITIONALLY: Download the complete mix in a zip file.

PREVIOUSLY: International Mix of Action; The Bix Mix; In the Lounge; My Sweet Hunk o’ Trash; Twins (The Cover Mix); The Lamplighter Mix; Move Along, No Green Here

IMAGE: Anza-Borrego Desert State Park, Blair Valley, California by William K. Waters

The Difficulty with Reenacting

Last Saturday, I sat through a two-hour panel discussion on slave housing. I’ll admit that it was a tiny bit tedious, eighteenth-century building techniques not being my primary interest, but I was taping it as a favor for my absent friend, the historian Henry Wiencek. Anyway, a scholar from Mount Vernon was explaining how he had supervised the reconstruction of a slave house at the plantation when a member of the audience piped up.

“Your house looks too nice,” he objected, pointing to the photo on the screen. “It should be more run down.”

“Everything’s new once,” the Mount Vernon guy responded curtly.

Okay, so things were finally getting interesting. Still, what fascinated me about the photo was not the house but the people next to it, two reenactors, or “interpreters,” pretending to be slaves. The photo below is from Mount Vernon’s website:

To me it was the interpreters, more than the house, who looked too nice. I’ll admit that I have a built-in skepticism when it comes to reenacting (you can read all about it here), but there’s something unsettling about pretending to a be a slave. I don’t mean to say that these particular interpreters are in any way inauthentic; it’s just difficult for my imagination to play along. We can know the scholarship and understand that the clothing’s correct (which, as Henry assured me, it is), but in the end, they’re not, you know, actually slaves.

And doesn’t that make all the difference?

Turns out that the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has been worrying over this same question on his New York Times blog. His context has been photographs and film—not real-life interpreters—but the questions are the same. How do we know what is real? Critics have long been skeptical of reenactments in documentary films, like Morris’s own The Thin Blue Line (1988), because of their ability to too easily manipulate our understanding of reality. Of history. The viewers, these critics seem to imply, are too credulous.

Take that photo from Mount Vernon. Those people stand out for me. They look relaxed. They look well fed, well dressed, almost happy. At the very least they look content. It’s an image that sticks to the mind in the way that only photographs can. The mind rebels, struggling against Mount Vernon’s demand that we suspend disbelief—these aren’t really slaves, after all—and yet, on some level seeing is believing.

This is a real danger in reenacting, and Morris confronts it head on. “The difficulty with images,” Morris writes, “is not suspending disbelief but rather the opposite—suspending our natural tendency to believe in their veracity. The seeing-is-believing principle.” He continues:

The kind of re-enactments I have in mind are not based on trying to fool you into believing that something is real that is not. Nor are they based on the suspension of disbelief. They are not asking us to suspend your disbelief in an artificial world that has been created expressly for their entertainment; they are asking the opposite of us—to study the relationship of an artificial world to the real world. They involve the suspension of belief—not disbelief. The audience is being asked the question: did it happen this way? The kind of re-enactments I have in mind makes us question what we believe and brings us deeper into the mystery of what happened.

Fine, Errol Morris. You go ahead and challenge what people believe. You delve into mysteries. But is this really what flesh-and-blood interpreters are able to do?

According to my friend Henry, yes. He suggested I read the chapter “A Scheme in Williamsburg” from his book An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003). In it, he writes of slave interpreters at Colonial Williamsburg who reenact a slave auction—one Washington helped to organize—in which families were separated. For the interpreters and audience alike, there was nothing fake about the drama of that moment when wife was separated from husband. People broke down into tears.

“The emotion was real,” Henry wrote, “and the woman who played Lucy later said she could not enact such a thing again.”

To come to grips with the feelings they had stirred in themselves by the reenactment, the Williamsburg staff invited a historian who had studied the psychology of slavery to give a lecture to the staff. She said that in the collective memory of African-Americans, there were five areas that were “ultra-sensitive,” and Williamsburg had ventured into two of them: one was auctions and the other was separation of families. In the oral histories of black families these events continued to echo and inflict pain. Families rarely spoke of such matters except among themselves because the humiliation they felt, even with the passage of time, was so great.

After reading that, I felt like my cynicism about reenacting—born from my experience as a Johnny Reb—had been put in its place. Still, it’s ironic that what makes this reenactment work is that the pain is real, and the pain is at the heart of what’s being reenacted. It’s not a byproduct; it’s the whole point. But in a Civil War battle reenactment, killing and being killed is at the center of everything, but it’s not real. It can’t be real. So the Williamsburg auction reenactments were discontinued while Civil War reenactments are going strong.

Go figure.

ELSEWHERE: Cross-posted here.

In Gabriel’s Band

Satch on Bix, from the former’s obituary in the Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1971:

In 1959 after recovering from a serious illness he reported to Down Beat magazine that “Bix [Beiderbecke] tried to get me up there to play first horn in Gabriel’s band, but I couldn’t make the gig. It hadn’t been cleared with Joe Glaser [his manager], the union or the State Department.”

‘It moves men mightily’

Wouldn’t you know, all the action is somewhere else. At the Encyclopedia Virginia blog—which you should definitely check out—a series of posts considers that well-traveled intersection of myth and history, and in particular the case of Robert E. Lee. (Seeing the old man’s visage on a World War II recruiting poster is alone worth the click.)

This, by the way, is Confederate Heritage Month, and while some commentators have an understandable desire to mock that fact, Bruce Catton—the great Civil War historian and, I believe, Michigan native—was more sympathetic to the usefulness of the Lost Cause mythology.

 The things that were done during the Civil War have not been forgotten, of course, but we now see them through a veil. We have elevated the entire conflict to the realm where it is no longer explosive. It is a part of American legend, a part of American history, a part, if you will, of American romance. It moves men mightily, to this day, but it does not move them in the direction of picking up their guns and going at it again.

These observations are followed by an acknowledgment—vis-à-vis that awesome Lee poster—that some traditions are invented out of whole cloth. Or poster board, or whatever.

An additional post takes a look at this Lost Cause mythologizing up close—and shivers.

[Douglas] Freeman is, shall we say, genteelly elliptical when it comes to matters of race. The Virginian, he tells us, is by his nature superbly considerate, this having to do with “the first law of the South—that a white man is a white man and must be treated as such regardless of his station.” As for those men who are not white: “The Virginia Negro is the blue-blood of his race” and “lynchings are rare”; in fact, he enjoys “the moral support of nearly all the whites.”

Never was a nearly more necessary!

Finally, Kevin Levin at Civil War Memory has gotten in on the fun by responding at length to a question of mine concerning myth, memory, and General Lee. He writes:

What I am suggesting is that while I understand the need to use Lee as a point of reconciliation and reunion I have to ask whether or not the way in which it was done involved too great a price.

It’s an interesting question, an interesting discussion, and I urge you to weigh in.

‘Ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!’

In the Chicago Tribune on Feb. 24, 1974, the incomparable rock critic Lester Bangs reviewed Remembering Bix, a memoir by Ralph Berton.

But in the end the lapidary triumph of Beiderbecke’s art may be as significant and, ironically, a direct refutation of the appalling waste of his life. Because Bix proved, five decades ago, that sleaze and destruction, the brandishing of the degrade and déclassé, are not necessary concomitants of an alternative art form: “What was Bix saying that no other musician had ever said? Simply that this jazz wasn’t on the bottom looking up any more. It was out on the level now, reaching for the heights; not grinning sardonically or defiantly at itself as black and poor and dirty and barefoot: Yeah, baby, I’m ugly, ain’t I, I’m evil and lowdown and funky, ain’t had a bath for a year, dig me!”

That’s a lesson that far too many white jivesters, from the Rolling Stones on down, have still not learned.

It can be tough to tell where Bangs ends and Berton begins . . .

A Pulitzer to the Monitor

I’m excited to say that a former colleague of mine has won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Congratulations to Preston Gannaway, who was just starting at the Monitor when I left. The honor is much deserved.

A Hero’s Death

I’m reading Dead Certainties by Simon Schama, a rather odd book that explores the often uneasy boundary between history and fiction. Schama is particularly interested in the death of James Wolfe, the British general whose army stormed Quebec in 1759—although his interest is less in the details than in how those details are lost, or, more to the point, how they are transformed into myth. Consider the 1770 painting by the American Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe (above).

From its first conception, West rejected literalism and embraced rhetoric. “Wolfe must not die like a common soldier under a Bush,” he wrote. “To move the mind there should be a spectacle presented to raise and warm the mind and all should be proportioned to the highest idea conceivd of the Hero . . . A mere matter of fact will never produce the effect.” Accordingly, throughout the composition, from top to bottom, mere fact is overwhelmed by inspired, symbolically loaded invention. It was this unapologetic hyperbole which set West’s painting off so dramatically from the prosaic versions that preceded it, none more painfully feeble than Edward Penny’s effort of 1763. Where that product of honest toil conscientiously had the General attended only by two officers and set down in a shrubby clearing apart from the battlefield, West produced the grandiloquent lie the public craved: a death at the very centre of the action; the firing of guns still sounding at his back; the St. Lawrence that he had finally conquered to his right; three groups of officers and men arrayed like a Greek chorus to witness the tragedy.

Schama goes on to explore the treatment of Wolfe in a history by the Bostonian Francis Parkman, and then veers into a long, sometimes fictional treatment of the 1849 murder of Parkman’s uncle, followed by the trial and hanging of a Harvard professor. It’s an odd book, but fascinating.

‘The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew.’

From “Quartet” by David Glines, in the autumn 1978 issue of Chicago Review:

Whiteman, in blackface, wearing a straw hat and bow tie, burst in on Gershwin, who was listening to Milhaud’s La Creation du Monde, enjoying the blues parts. The raucous din of garbage can lids drifted up tinnily from elevator shafts, the click of dice was heard from alleys where men were playing craps. All the way from Brooklyn you could smell the cabbage cooking.

“Cabbage!” Gershwin choked out, approaching tears.

“Mississippi Mud,” Whiteman responded.

“Whiteman,” Gershwin crooned rhapsodically, “I was walking down Broadway today and the Blues hit me.”

“Wang Wang, Washboard or Weary?”

“Let’s go to Paris, Whiteman.”

“What would an American do in Paris, Georgie?”

“Dance! Get the Blues!”

They broke into a soft shoe shuffle then into a full scale Broadway production tap dance routine without even having to change their shoes. Taxicab horns honked out rhythms for them.

All night they danced, played poker, told jokes, smoked Havanas, wore visors and arm bands, Broadway babies near their ears. They were too hot to cool down. Then . . . the Blues hit Gershwin right there, in the wee hours on Fifth Avenue! “Man, the Blues!” Gershwin wailed. It all happened outside an all-night diner—inside a man sitting at the counter, wearing a fedora, hunched over a cup of coffee as the last Uptown bus was pulling out with nobody on it.

Whiteman, singing in a clown suit, was ascending a stairway to the Stars. New York looked like a thirty-minute etch in a nitric acid bath. Gershwin, his hair falling out, was imitating Al Jolson on bended knee. The band blared. Bix Beiderbecke blew. The stars were out in the Bronx. The wind whistled through the gray canyons of buildings. John Sloan, in his studio, was painting a nude. Pots and pans flew out the windows of the tenement buildings. Bix blew. The nude put on her clothes. They all had the Blues. Whiteman was chasing his hat along a gutter on 42nd Street. He never came back. The Blues had settled in.

IMAGE: Sixth Avenue Elevated at Third Street (New York City) (oil, 1928; original in color) by John Sloan

Bix, the Blitz, and Condoms (Two)

From a story in the Independent of London about the radical theater director Joan Littlewood and her protégé Howard Goorney:

Devoted to Littlewood’s style of work, Goorney remained crucial to her ensemble ideals for over 30 years, while she in turn was like a surrogate mother to him when adolescent. On one occasion [during the Second World War], she and the girls in the company decided that his melancholy appearance (a lifelong trait) was because he had just fallen in love but was likely for immediate call-up; they arranged a love-nest with a gas fire, Guinness, Bix Beiderbecke record and condoms (two) thoughtfully provided. Anxious next day for the result, they were disappointed when Goorney shook his head: “The sirens went just as I was getting down to it. I had to make for the hospital—I was on fire-guard duty.” What Goorney kept from all but Littlewood was that the nurses’ home had been hit and that all night he had been bringing out the dead.

Ouch

From Pauline Kael’s For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies (1994):

Rain Main is Dustin Hoffman humping one note on a piano for two hours and eleven minutes. It’s his dream role.

VQR: Iowans Still Have Essential Dignity

I was checking out the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review online earlier today and ran across a short review of a new collection of black-and-white photographs: Driftless: Photographs from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier. According to VQR, the subjects of Frazier’s work—migrants, slaughterhouse and factory types, people who live in trailers—“haven’t been defeated”; rather, they get their pleasure “in the form of deer hunting and pool halls, cigarettes, beer, and”—wait for it—“love.”

In the end, the magazine assures us, these poor Iowans manage to hold on to their “essential dignity.”

Christ Almighty. How much more condescending and clichéd can a review get?

Still, the photos are gorgeous. And bleak. And make me miss home. Find a whole slideshow here and another exhibit here.

IMAGE: Dirt Road, Near Lone Tree, 2003 by Danny Wilcox Frazier

‘This is glory enough for one day’

I’ve told you before about the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi River, connecting Davenport, Iowa, with Rock Island, Illinois. (Read about how Robert E. Lee, Jeff Davis, and Abe Lincoln all had their hands in the project.) But you’ve got to read the Chicago Press report of the first crossing, on April 22, 1856, to get a sense of how a big a deal this was. For instance, the paper begins its coverage with, of all people, Julius Caesar (excuse, if you can, the garbled syntax):

When Caesar with his legions crossed the Rubicon, which divides Cissalpine Gaul from Italy, he was well aware of the greatness of the work he was engaged in; and although many attempted to dissuade him from such an undertaking, yet nothing daunted he landed his array on the plains of Italy, astonished the world by his deeds—and left mankind an instance of bravery and enterprise worthy of record.

Et tu, Davenport?

We, too, however, have crossed the “Rubicon”—the great “Father of Waters”—which for centuries has rolled on into the bosom of the mighty ocean without a pier to mar its progress. To-day has the mighty deed been accomplished at which the world has so often smiled in derision. Yes, the Mississippi is practically no more. It is spanned by the mighty artery of commerce and enterprise—the railroad. Science has stretched its arms across the ever-flowing Mississippi—and along its fine-knit muscles has the “iron horse” bounded with a heavy snort as it scent from afar the sluggish waters of the Missouri. The mission of Caesar of old was to conquer; so that of the Caesar of the nineteenth century; but the latter is one of peace and plenty. The “war horse” of civilization may have fiery nostrils, but it has an olive branch, the seeds from which it scatters as it flies.

The New York Daily Times, which ran a story on April 28, was not given to such melodrama. It lopped off those two grafs from the Press’s coverage and began here:

That such an event should have occurred without an assemblage of spectators from all quarters of the globe to witness it, is only another instance of the mighty progress which has been made within the last fifty years in the science of bridge building. As we approached Rock Island there were rumors afloat that we would cross to Iowa on the bridge. “Cross the Mississippi on a bridge!” cried an intelligent looking gentleman. “On a bridge?” simpered a feminine voice from a young lady to her parents, bound for Council Bluffs; “why, Pa, I thought the Mississippi was a great river, larger than the Hudson.”

The Times went on to provide specs of the bridge, blah blah blah, but cut the big moment—when train meets bridge! So back to the Press:

Swiftly we sped along the iron track—Rock Island appeared in sight—the whistle sounded and the conductor cried out, “Passengers for Iowa keep their seats!” There was a pause—a hush, as it were, preparatory to the fierceness of a tornado. Tho cars roared on—the bridge was reached—“We’re on the bridge—see the mighty Mississippi rolling on beneath”—and all eyes were fastened on the mighty parapets of the magnificent bridge, over which we glided in solemn silence. A few minutes and the suspended breath was let loose. “We’re over!” was the cry, “we have crossed the Mississippi in a railroad car.” “This is glory enough for one day,” said a passenger, as he hustled his carpetbag and himself out of the cars.

IMAGE: A rare photograph of the bridge, from Arsenal Island, dated around 1860

Bix in the Times (Gracious Sakes!)

It is often said that Bix Beiderbecke was mentioned in print but once or twice in his lifetime. While this isn’t true, it nevertheless took until January 23, 1938—or six and a half years after his death—for the New York Times to take notice of his life. And then it was only in a letter to the editor. The occasion was Benny Goodman’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert, which critics today suggest marked the birth of swing but which the Times then only sniffed at. This is the attitude that got Robert B. Tufts of White Plains, New York, all het up.

As to your decision that swing is just a passing fad, due soon to fade, ne’er more to return, you might be interested in knowing that swing (the real article) has been played well on for twenty years now and will continue to be played for many, many years to come. Of course, swing has been lionized by the public at large only within the last three years or so, but, gracious sakes! real musicians such as King Oliver, Louie Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, Jack Teagarden and Bix Beiderbecke, to mention only a few, were playing authentic swing years and years before this. The public stage of swing may, as you gloomily predict, soon die out, but there’ll be plenty of musicians who will carry on the torch for years to come.

To hear Goodman’s homage to Bix from that concert, check out the Bix Mix.

On Reading Porn

I’m reading Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home—a gorgeous and disturbing experience, for while the 2006 comic-book memoir is “breathtakingly smart” and “eloquent,” to quote Time magazine, which named it the year’s best book, and “Proustian,” to steal from the New York Times, it’s also wrenching and difficult and left me, in places, a little shattered.

This is often the point of a good book and nearly always the point of literature. A few sensitive souls at the University of Utah, however, have deemed it pornography and want it removed from the English curriculum there.

“Drawings depicting sex acts are included in the 230-page novel,” a local television station reports (rather clinically).

A student in the class was offended and approached the group “No More Pornography,” which made headlines earlier this year when it staged a successful protest of music videos shown in a gym in Provo. The group has started an online petition in protest of the book.

[Anti-porn group leader Thomas] Alvord says, “It’s like they’re turning their back and pretending graphics, depiction of oral sex, are not an issue.”

Imagine that! To the university’s credit, they will not give in to such pressure. The book is too good. It tells the coming-of-age story of Bechdel’s own coming out, and it does so in the long shadow of her parents’ unhappy marriage, her father’s secret homosexuality, apparent pederasty, and subsequent suicide. Or was it a suicide? Nothing comes easy in this book, and Bechdel looks to James, Proust, and Wilde, among others, for guides to telling and understanding her story—which is about death and family and sexual identity and memory and, finally, about storytelling itself.

Why on earth would you want to teach such a thing?

IMAGE: A shockingly pornographic image from Fun Home

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (8)

Dear Brendan,

The comparison between World War I and Vietnam is interesting, and my observations on it tie in to the fact that it was often the civilians, not the veterans, who didn’t want to talk about the war.

To begin with Vietnam: as both of us remember, it took a while for the public to come to terms—however impartially—with that war. As veterans know, especially wounded veterans, the hatred with which civilians treated returning soldiers in the late 1960s changed to a vast indifference in the 1970s. People just didn’t want to hear about it, or talk about it—much as no one wants to talk about the fighting in Iraq now. Although The Deer Hunter came out in 1978 and Apocalypse Now in 1979, it was not really until the mid-1980s that discussion of the Vietnam War intensified to the point that the public was able to process it and make some sense of where it fit into our history. Since then, I think that historians and popular writers have done a fairly good job of discussing it frankly and revealing something of its true nature.

Much the same thing happened after 1918, as we’ve been discussing. The difference is that Americans never came to terms with that war in any real sense. Yes, isolationism, the Great Depression, and World War II intervened; but there’s more to it than that. In part, we need to remember that the culture was different in the 1920s than it was in the ’70s or ’80s. On the one hand, there was the sense that “polite people don’t talk about that sort of thing”—so that while from time to time people would speak of the plight of impoverished veterans, especially after the Bonus March of 1932, no one wanted to discuss the brutality and degradation of the actual fighting. On the other, society became dominated by the escapism of the Roaring Twenties—Bix Beiderbecke’s heyday—and didn’t want to discuss the ugliness of the past.

In Europe, along with Canada and Australia, 1929–30 brought a turning inward, a kind of national introspectiveness, when books like All Quiet on the Western Front became popular. In America, apart from a brief blip of interest, nothing of the sort happened. Of course, we had not suffered as much as they had. But the almost frenetic optimism with which Americans have always liked to look at the world also played a heavy role.

In conclusion, the answer is that I have no answer. Most everything I’ve said has been speculation. Even if the why is unanswerable, though, I think it’s clear that this ignorance of our past, and the willful forgetfulness of a whole generation of Americans, is something that we need to overcome.

I appreciate all of your excellent questions and look forward to our discussion later this week!

Regards,

Ed Lengel

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7

IMAGE: 1et Division Band playing the national hymn at the Argonne cemetery on the 30th of May 1919

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘A war-mad little drunkard, a pompous class-addled ass’

I had planned to say a few words about Colm Tóibín’s review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review. I thought Tóibín, much less a historian than a literary man, was an interesting choice of reviewer for a book that seeks to reappraise the Second World War. My thoughts on that are summed up in the comments section at Charlottesville Words. More interesting is this colorful rant from my friend Rick:

Brendan, the review in today’s New York Times on Nicholas Baker’s new book brings to mind much of the reading I’ve been doing the past two years. It has to deal with the nature of terrorism, and in particular, state terrorism. It’s easy to write about authoritarian monsters such as Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. They provide easy access to narratives that comfort our sense that we stand outside the scope of such heinous deeds.

But when I read A. N. Wilson’s two-volume British history—starting with Queen Victoria’s era, and covering in volume two the first fifty years of the 20th century, ending with WWII and the demise of British Empire—it was clear that previously assumed heroic figures such as Winston Churchill were anything but. He comes across as a war-mad little drunkard, a pompous class-addled ass willing to mass murder people of Mesopotamia, India, the Sind . . . you name it. That fat little fucker loved to use the British Air Force to lay waste to civilian populations, rationalized by the idea they were uncivilized.

Gore Vidal, who’s work is imperfect but still impressive in scope—especially his historical saga that begins, chronologically, with Burr and ends with the Kennedy era—has similar judgments to make. Then, there’s the case of James Carroll, whose recent history of the Pentagon lays more blame with the United States for the Cold War than he does the Soviet Union.

Clearly, in the work of Wilson, Vidal, and Carroll, we are not “the good guys.” I believe indiscriminate use of Air Force bombing raids over civilian targets is a form of terrorism. And, I believe, our country’s leaders feel a lot easier in using this kind of war. Clearly, the United States gets upset when half a dozen of our finest are killed in action. But if a thousand or who-knows-how-many are killed by indiscriminate bombing, and the major part of those people are civilians, hey, no problem.

I’ve never been a fan of Nicholas Baker’s work. I’ve tried two of his novels and they didn’t hold my attention. His attention to detail may be fabulous in its minutiae, but as a reader, it doesn’t engross me. Guess you gotta like that kind of stuff to want to read on. I prefer a good yarn. 600 or 700 dense and detailed pages by James Carroll, with a hundred pages of endnotes, were far more engrossing. But after reading the review in today’s Times, I may have to dip into Baker’s latest. We need to rub our faces in our own complicity in world terror, and stop pretending that this country is beyond such perfidy.

I’ve read three or four of Baker’s books and they did hold my attention. I continue to laugh remembering the pornographic scenes in The Fermata, and I thought Box of Matches sublime. But I’m skeptical of Human Smoke. The form is literary (hence Tóibín as a reviewer) and designed, perhaps, to invoke feeling more than thoughtful consideration. Why not write a history if yours is a historical argument? And if it is not primarily a historical argument—if it is, for instance, primarily a political argument—why couch it in history?

To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (7)

Dr. Lengel,

I appreciate your reluctance to moralize about war. You could safely say that war is hell (to quote Sherman) or, less safely, that it has an “absolute and uncompromising allegiance to obscenity and evil” (to quote the Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien). But since you weren’t there, that wouldn’t be history; that would be ideology. You can only go on what the soldiers say.

There’s more to be said on that, but I’d rather, and I’m sure you’d rather, we moved on. Toward the end of To Conquer Hell, you write that “the Meuse-Argonne opened a lasting perception gap in American society. On one side stood the combat veterans; on the other, everyone else.”

Of course, that perception is nicely illustrated in our deciding to leave the nature of war up to those veterans. But it’s more than that, obviously. What you describe is an environment eerily like Vietnam-era America, where returning soldiers were shunned, where they felt out of it for all that they had seen and could not explain their experiences to their loved ones. “I became a citizen,” one Doughboy recalls, “but not a good one.” “War does something to a person,” another soldier testified. “We were scared, but we had to develop a numbness and an unfeeling attitude toward it all. Otherwise, we would have lost our minds.”

In the end, most soldiers just kept quiet—but not, you argue, “because they didn’t want to talk, but because nobody seemed willing to listen.” War memoirs were huge in Europe and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front was translated into English in 1929. But while high quality books by American veterans were being written and published, the American public just wasn’t buying them.

Why do you think that is? And why do you think, for instance, that Vietnam was different? After all, that war launched many a writer, Tim O’Brien not least among them. Whatever the answer, the resistance to the war that you’ve mentioned more than once seems to be a phenomenon that started right away. And that fact, for me anyway, makes it no less in explicable.

The upshot, you write, is that the Doughboy “never became as fixed in the American public imagination as the Tommy in Britain, the digger in Australia, or the Poilu in France.”

Who was he? At the war’s beginning, he was like any other American soldier in any other era—young, confident, naïve, eager for adventure, and mostly believing in the cause and country for which he fought. Perhaps the only thing that set him apart in 1917 was his immigrant roots. By the end of 1918, however, he had become something very different and unique. Of all the soldiers in American history, the Doughboy is the first to have experienced industrialized warfare. He did so without preparation of any kind—military or psychological—and suffered terribly as a result. Yet no other solider in American history or perhaps the history of the world learned how to fight in such a short period of time. Over a period of just a few months, four million volunteers and draftees endured, adapted, and finally overcame all obstacles to become first-rate soldiers. In the process they lost some of their youth, confidence, and naivete. But they had shown, far more than any number of generals, diplomats, or politicians could ever have done, that America had an important role to play on the world stage.

This strikes me as an eloquent tribute to the long-neglected Doughboy. The dominant narrative in American pop and political culture is that we saved the Europeans’ butts in the First World War and then again in the Second. Your tribute, and your book, are no worse for complicating that portrait.

Thanks for participating in this conversation, and I very much look forward to your talk next week.

PREVIOUSLY: To Conquer Hell: A Conversation (Intro); Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6

IMAGE: American recruiting poster

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

On Bix & Funky

From “Funky” by Peter Tamony in American Speech (Vol. 55, No. 3, Autumn 1980):

Perhaps the earliest definition of funky is recorded in a brief glossary in Time’s cover article on Dave Brubeck (8 Nov. 1954): “Funky, adj. Authentic, swinging.” A week later, Walter Winchell strictured, “Time mag goofed with its jazz glossary. Said ‘Funky’ means authentic swing. Real hipsters say it means old-time rickety jazz” (San Francisco Call-Bulletin, 15 Nov. 1954). Obviously, the downhome connotation was being extended by a rebirth of feeling in jazz. The celebrated Bix Beiderbecke was said to have been funky because of his careless personal habits. “It was not just a joke that jazz clubs have been and are called ‘toilets.’” So the adjective was transferred to the rawness, the earthiness of blues played in closely packed, often unventilated, seven-day-sock joints with clogged plumbing, in which most black and white jazzmen have been sentenced to employment.

It’s a Complicated Story