Horizon

Waiter Rant

Perhaps I just don't have enough "material" in my profession. Perhaps the general public doesn't react well to stories whose zinger is "and he didn't believe in relational integrity constraints!" Regardless, there is simply nothing I could write about my day's labor that could match Waiter Rant, a blog by a professional waiter and former seminarian that's so good it demands the consumption of each morcel from its archives. Waiter, this quote's for you!

And if he were not lively about it, if he did not go with a nimble hop-skip-and-jump, then Tashtego had an ungentlemanly way of accelerating him by darting a fork at his back, harpoonwise. And once Daggoo, seized with a sudden humor, assisted Dough-Boy's memory by snatching him up bodily, and thrusting his head into a great empty wooden trencher, while Tashtego, knife in hand, began laying out the circle preliminary to scalping him. He was naturally a very nervous, shuddering sort of little fellow, this bread-faced steward; the progeny of a bankrupt baker and a hospital nurse. And what with the standing spectacle of the black terrific Ahab, and the periodical tumultuous visitations of these three savages, Dough-Boy's whole life was one continual lip-quiver. Commonly, after seeing the harpooneers furnished with all things they demanded, he would escape from their clutches into his little pantry adjoining, and fearfully peep out at them through the blinds of its door, till all was over.

Lunar Sabbath

Between the demands of work and family, I don't get much time to do the online loon-watching I did several years ago. Or at least that's what I tell myself — more likely I've just traded that hobby for pipe-carving and blogging. What I do manage to squeeze into my hectic schedule is more likely to come from my shortwave than my laptop, and that's a much less reliable source, being susceptible to interference and padded with dull broadcasts from Havana, Beijing, or Denmark.

Lately, my favorite broadcast has been a show that runs on WWCR every evening, on the "lunar sabbath". There's this guy in Alabama who runs sincere and heavily accented monologues attempting to convince the seeker that proper Christian worship is only carried out if you have your eye on the phases of the moon, and that the usual every-seven-days stuff is no better than sleeping in.

It is hard for me to imagine anything on the religious landscape more quintessitially American than his program. Think about it: one man with no education, no institutional authority, no credentials and no wealth decides that his own reading of the Bible trumps the combined testimony of a billion co-religionists and literally thousands of years of tradition. Armed only with his conscience and an argument that is unanswered (if not unanswerable), he stares that massive consensus in the face and says: "You're wrong."

Great minds

One of the Daily Kos people seems to be rereading Melville.

What river? What woods?

...Just me attacking a ten-pound (deceased) turkey with a pliers for what seemed like half an hour but probably wasn't. Grownuphood, good grief. They don't tell you life is gonna involve turkey wings full of sheared-off quill stubs. Not that life doesn't also involve worse. I'm just saying.

Apart from which, wishing everyone a very lovely day off, supposing you've got one, and condolences to our British and Canadian friends who haven't.

[P.S. Am now less cranky, more awake, and discovering I nearly forgot the sacrament of "Alice's Restaurant". Wishing a pleasant day to all.]

'Nother anachronism

So much alliteration in the grander passages of Melville that it gets to sounding like Beowulf by way of Shakespeare. E.g.:

During all this blackness of the elements, Ahab, though assuming for the time the almost continual command of the drenched and dangerous deck, manifested the gloomiest reserve...

...Meantime, the crew driven from the forward part of the ship by the perilous seas that burstingly broke over its bows, stood in a line along the bulwarks in the waist; and the better to guard against the leaping waves, each man had slipped himself into a sort of bowline secured to the rail..."

It sure sounds like he's making intentional use of archaic language and meter here to suggest ancient epic, but -- and maybe Alan H. can help us here -- was the really old Beowulf stuff already being dusted off in the 1840s? Or did all this come to Melville by way of later intermediaries like Shakespeare? Any other thoughts about literary precedents he would have known and respected?

"Good Night, and Good Luck"

Anyone seen it yet? Here's the trailer. (Ben, there's even something for you to like in it: a cigarette.) And here's a Molly Ivins memoir to go with it.

Portmanteaux

There's a delightful thread about misunderstood words over at the Volokh's. Eugene asked for examples of people misinterpreting an unfamiliar word based on its context — a bit like the mondegreen — and his commenters have had a ball on that and related subjects. One of my favorites is the observation by one JBurgess that An error of applying the wrong language's rules of pronunciation leads to the annoying mispronunciation of "coup de grâce". ... Rather than a blow of mercy or the putting another out of his/her misery (Ku de gras), it is frequently offered up as, being hit by fat (Ku de Graa).

I have a friend who is not a native English speaker. When we talk about childrearing, she often uses the phrase "when she's a little more independable." I've never corrected her on it — partly because I'm never sure which word she means, and partly because "independable" really does seem perfect.

Douthat and Salam on the Republican Party

I've mentioned before that I'm an edge-of-my-seat spectator of the Democratic Party's post-election soul searching after its last few defeats. So it's interesting to see that the Weekly Standard picked the week of the gubernatorial elections to run "The Party of Sam's Club", which predicts dissatisfaction among Republican voters and proposes a few radical policy changes. Like most such papers, the authors begin by painting a dire picture of the current situation, peppered with insults at the party's opponents: an attempt to justify why decisionmakers should pay any attention to them while reassuring them that the authors are not actually moles:

This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."

Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn't just out of touch with the country as a whole, it's out of touch with its own base. And its majority is hardly unassailable: Despite facing a lackluster Democratic presidential candidate who embodied virtually all the qualities Americans loathe--elitism, aloofness, Europhilia, vacillating weakness--George W. Bush, war president and skilled campaigner, was very nearly defeated in his bid for reelection.

This is followed by a collection of suggestions (page 2, scroll down) that sound suspiciously like it was borrowed from the other party's platform. In Salam and Douthat's case, this means a form of the welfare state with some conservative window dressing: They propose "a generous baby bonus" as well as "subsidies to those who provide child care in the home, and pension credits that reflect the economic value of years spent in household labor." They write a long section on health care that stops barely short of socialized medicine, and suggest "wage subsidies" for low-income workers.

Salam and Douthat do depart from traditional American liberal economic policies in a few places, however and they're quite puzzling. They call for tighter immigration controls. They speak favorably of a national sales tax. And that baby bonus I've mentioned above is "pro-natalist" in a way that seems alien to American politics. In fact, what they seem to be arguing is that the Republican Party should model their domestic policy not on that of the Democrats, but rather on that of France.

Tobacco and History

My daughter's copy of Goodnight, Moon is a cardboard-page edition that does not contain any photographs of the author or illustrator. Little did we know that that choice would sidestep a battle over Stalinesque retouching.

Anachronism (Kind of) II

In Chapter Three, Ishmael describes the noxious liquor, and fraudulent servings, to be found in taverns like the Spouter-Inn:

"Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without - within, the villainous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass - the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulp down for a shilling."

I was a bit surprised to see the unit of currency mentioned. Did mid-century Americans still refer in slang to (I assume) nickels as 'shillings'? Or was international currency accepted more freely than it is today?

No Other Side

From this morning's Daily Pennsylvanian:

A former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America still remembers believing an end had come to the battle for reproductive rights.

"When I joined Planned Parenthood in 1974, they weren't politically involved. It was one year after the Roe v. Wade decision, and it was a time when everyone thought, 'OK, we've won.'"

But 30 years later, Gloria Feldt finds herself rallying the next generation of reproductive-rights advocates around rapidly disappearing claims.

More than 100 students, most of them female, came to hear the previous president of the largest pro-choice organization in America assess the state of reproductive rights today.
...
She lamented media coverage that constantly tries to strike a "false balance" on what she sees as clear-cut health initiatives.

"There's no 'other side' to health care," she said. "There's no 'other side' to Pap smears."

One of the more depressing features of today's political 'debate' is not so much its coarseness, but that fewer and fewer people even seem to think that there is a debate, at least one worth having anyway.

Consider for a moment Ms. Feldt's last observation. What does she mean when she says there is no other side to, say, health care? What, in other words, is this truth about health care that is so self-evidently correct that no reasonable person could question it? I suppose it might be that health care is a good thing, or that on balance it's better that people are well rather than poorly. If that is the case, I can't see much objection to what Ms. Feldt has said. The problem is though that these are not really questions in the political sense. They're trite statements of the obvious. In terms of public policy, they're useless. They have the same intellectual rigor as a proclamation that water is wet.

If Ms. Feldt intended to say something a little more substantive, then I suppose what she was really getting at was this: health care operating under the conditions that I imagine for it is a good thing. This at least escapes the banal. The problem is that there's nothing in the least bit one-sided about it. What proportion of the national income should be devoted to health care? How is the bill to be divvied up - by individuals, by private organizations, and by the state? What should be a spending priority and what should not? All of these strike me as quite legitimate questions that reasonable people can differ upon, and all of them challenge Ms. Feldt's insistence that there is no worthwhile debate to be had in the first place.

To me, the sad thing is that I would probably agree with quite a lot of what Ms. Feldt had to say about the specifics of health care policy, if only she could be persuaded that her opinions are not a priori truths that only the wicked or incompetent could possibly take issue with.

Anachronism?

From Chapter 2:

A hundred black faces turned round in their rows to peer; and beyond, a black Angel of Doom was beating a book in a pulpit. It was a Negro church; and the preacher's text was about the blackness of darkness, and the weeping and wailing and teeth-gnashing there.

Aside from the biblical penalty for a poor ROI, this struck me as odd. I'd been under the impression that segregated churches only came into existence after the Civil War. Melville's writing sometime before 1850. What gives?

Tackling Hitch

Daniel Green, of The Reading Experience, takes on C. Hitchens, the literary critic.

In the book’s [Why Orwell Matters] concluding chapter, Hitchens more or less confesses that his interest in Orwell is not really literary: “The disputes and debates and combats in which George Orwell took part are receding into history, but the manner in which he conducted himself as a writer and participant has a reasonable chance of remaining as a historical example of its own.” In the end Hitchens has probably measured Orwell’s legacy correctly. He is more likely to survive because of what he stood for rather than what he wrote, as a figure from intellectual history rather than literary history. But Hitchens’s esteem for Orwell’s example nevertheless illuminates the premises upon which he usually proceeds as a literary critic. The poets and novelists Hitchens writes about are important to him for what they represent, for the way in which they illustrate historical movements and political ideas, for their beliefs and their habits of mind. Presumably, from Hitchens’s perspective about the most praiseworthy thing that might be said about an author is that he “conducted himself” as a writer particularly well, not that he (or she—although Hitchens considers very few if any women writers in any of his reviews and essays) has produced a work of literature the experience of reading which might serve as the object of literary criticism.

Loomings

Sometimes you overthink things; sometimes you mistake a wrinkle in the sea for a serpent, and you stand and stare, waiting for confirmation that you have seen what is not there. Moby-Dick’s narrator may or may not be Ishmael, but he is an Ishmael. And we should assume by Ishmael we are speaking of the Biblical Ishmael, the outcast, the victim of a Sarah’s jealousy. But I can’t leave it at that.

The Ishmael of Islam is ordered into the desert by God, not forced out by a family dispute. Melville’s Ishmael “exile” is self-imposed (“it is a way I have of driving off the spleen”) or driven by a sort of divine authority (“the invisible police officer of the fates”). The Ishmael of Muhammad is a seeker of water, saved by the Zamzam Well; and though it is a great stretch, it is tempting – jumping ahead to the novel’s end – to find a connection there with Queegueg’s coffin bubbling out of the sea to save our narrator. What is a sailor, anyway, but an ocean nomad?

There is reason to believe Melville was familiar with the Koran, but none to think many 19th century readers were. If I’m going to read this book I’ll have to remember not every fish is a whale.

Kinsley on Constitutions

Via Slate:

"On Wednesday, the British Parliament humiliated the prime minister, Tony Blair, by solidly rejecting his proposal to let police keep someone in custody for up to 90 days without bringing charges. Although the political interest was in how many members of Blair's own Labor Party deserted him, it was the overwhelming opposition by Conservatives that killed the thing. To an American, it takes a bit of effort to wrap your head around this: The prime minister, who leads the rough equivalent of the Democratic Party, said that the sacrifice of freedom was necessary to the war on terror. But the rough equivalent of the Republican Party said that individual rights are more important.

We need not leap to the assumption that this was entirely a matter of glorious principle. No doubt opportunism and the yin/yang of politics played a role: Blair became a ferocious supporter of George W. Bush's war in part to show that a party of the left could be hard-nosed about this sort of thing. And once the war became the dominant issue of British politics, it became only natural that the Tory opposition would find reasons to oppose it. But even if opportunism is what led Conservatives to oppose 90-day detention, there was a language and a set of values available to them to make the case seem at least principled and sincere. It has to do with the traditional conservative suspicion of government and respect for the individual—even the individual accused of terrorism."

Ahnuld, The Musical

If you liked "Nixon In China" ... well, even if you didn't...

How about a musical and/or light opera featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger's doomed, overreaching attempt to govern the state of California? I mean, it's got visuals -- his pectorals and humvees, Maria's freakish cheekbones, plus jostling choruses of obese polyestered groupies, conga-dancing nurses, and seriously pissed-off queer activists. It's got yer basic ancient Greek story arc of pride, hubris, comeuppance and catharsis. It's got romance, it's got drama, it's got the politics of spectacle slamming a la "Blazing Saddles" into a bunch of real live humans who know the difference between a state and a stage set. Not to mention Warren Beatty reprising his role as Jay Billington Bulworth. Dramatically speaking, at least, what's not to like?

Or, OK, it's really that J. came up with the line, "Brie for a fee in Californ-i-a" and now we need someplace to use it. Where's Stephen Sondheim when we need him?

...OK, if that doesn't fly, I hear Schwarzenegger's in China himself this week. Maybe Mr. Adams feels like writing a sequel?

Book Markings

I never make marks in books, aside from the occasional grease splatters that appear when I'm trying to eat fried chicken and read at the same time. Anne Fadiman would say that makes me a "courtly lover" of books, as opposed to the "carnal lover" types like my wife. The few times I've tried to read with a pen in hand, I've had to lay down my pen in defeat.

That said, I usually enjoy the markings left by previous owners on the pages of the books I acquire. My copy of Manchester's The Last Lion, volume 2 is peppered with suggestions of better wording than that Churchill actually used, though the corrections are in tentative pencil and only occur once every hundred pages or so. The underlinings in my 1933 Lehrbuch der Geschichte für die oberen Klassen der Gymnasien probably say more of interest than the text itself does. The marginal glosses in my German Theological Reader give me a rare sense of superiority to the previous owner: Really, if you have to look up "ging", aren't you a bit over your head?

My edition of Moby Dick was plundered from my grandmother's house. It belonged to my mother in college and — come to think of it — I suppose it still does. Aside from the name and dormroom inscribed on the first page, there are exactly four penstrokes in the book. They all reside in the table of contents, marking through the chapter numbers 33, 55, 56, and 57 with a single red line. The last time I tried to read Moby Dick, I found these markings to be a wise guide against getting bogged down in chapters headed "Cetology" or worse.

Bobby has stated his intent to go off course, savoring the oxbows as well as the main channel. In that, I wish him luck. As for me, I'll follow my hand-drawn map.

Poem of the Day

Keith Douglas, 1920-1944.

Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.

As the processes of earth
strip off the colour and the skin
take the brown hair and blue eye

and leave me simpler than at birth
when hairless I came howling in
as the moon came in the cold sky.

Of my skeleton perhaps
so stripped, a learned man will say
'He was of such a type and intelligence,' no more.

Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may
deduce, from the long pain I bore

the opinions I held, who was my foe
and what I left, even my appearance
but incidents will be no guide.

Time's wrong-way telescope will show
a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.

Through that lens see if I seem
substance or nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable oblivion

not by momentary spleen
or love into decision hurled
leisurely arrive at an opinion.

Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.

Before Ishmael

They say it’s the most famous first sentence, but if you’re starting with Call me Ishmael, you’re skipping a few pages of pleasure. I never thought of Melville as a jokester, but he seems to be having fun by leading off with the Etymology section and this introduction of his source:

The pale Usher- threadbare in coat, heart, body, and brain; I see him now. He was ever dusting his old lexicons and grammars, with a queer handkerchief, mockingly embellished with all the gay flags of all the known nations of the world. He loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality.

The Extracts are worth the viewing. Two stick out for me. This one, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson, quoting Oliver Goldsmith:

"If you should write a fable for little fishes, you would make them speak like great whales."

Then this, from a work called Currents and Whales (and which I cannot trace), that seems to be a metaphor for the book you are about to read:

"It is impossible to meet a whale-ship on the ocean without being struck by her near appearance. The vessel under short sail, with look-outs at the mast-heads, eagerly scanning the wide expanse around them, has a totally different air from those engaged in regular voyage."

Word Games

It is unfair, of course, to pick on Texas – as unfair as suggesting all Vermonters are latte-drinking, Volvo-driving Lefties – but there’s something about the wording of the state constitution amendment they passed yesterday.

SECTION 1. Article I, Texas Constitution, is amended by adding Section 32 to read as follows: Sec. 32. (a) Marriage in this state shall consist only of the union of one man and one woman. (b) This state or a political subdivision of this state may not create or recognize any legal status identical or similar to marriage.

Now, I know what it means, but Ben, it reads like you folks have defined marriage and banned it.

Big Fish

I’ll call my house The Pequod. The electric bill will be referred to as the leviathan. If I lose my job, I’ll go home and say to the wife, hey, call me Ishmael. Before I fly into road rage when I get cut off in traffic, I’ll remind myself that it might be wiser to be a Starbuck than a Flask.

I’m thinking 2006 is going to be a year of taking Moby-Dick seriously. And I don’t mean simply rereading it and staying awake, although let’s face it, Moby-Dick is the Stonehenge of American Lit – you don’t have to go there to see it. I’m talking about an organic approach, Moby-Dick as an organizing principle, employing it as a metaphor for living. All Moby-Dick all the time.

Right off the bat, isn’t Moby-Dick a metaphor for just reading Moby-Dick?

Poem of the Day

Kipling, via Bragg:

A PICT SONG (1906)

Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on--that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords.

We are the Little Folk--we!
Too little to love or to hate.
Leave us alone and you'll see
How we can drag down the State!
We are the worm in the wood!
We are the rot at the root!
We are the taint in the blood!
We are the thorn in the foot!

Mistletoe killing an oak--
Rats gnawing cables in two--
Moths making holes in a cloak--
How they must love what they do!
Yes--and we Little Folk too,
We are busy as they--
Working our works out of view--
Watch, and you'll see it some day!

No indeed! We are not strong,
But we know Peoples that are.
Yes, and we'll guide them along
To smash and destroy you in War!
We shall be slaves just the same?
Yes, we have always been slaves,
But you--you will die of the shame,
And then we shall dance on your graves!

We are the Little Folk--we!
Too little to love or to hate.
Leave us alone and you'll see
How we can drag down the State!

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part V

Part IV
Part III
Part II
Part I

(Hat tip to Joan's Place).

An even more important villain in the history of Bonfire has been the town authority itself, its crime to try to inhibit the carrying-out of the festival in the name of public order or safety. It is small wonder that the leading men of Lewes originally took a dim view of the town masses congregating to drink and start large fires, no matter how ostensibly noble the cause - particularly in an era without an organized police force or fire brigade. Their conventional response up to 1848 was to suppress, in some cases by the use of the Riot Act and the threat of call-out of the local militia. In the year of the great European revolutions, and perhaps not without some faint connection, the authorities changed tack and instead tried to tame Bonfire by co-opting it and making it a quasi-official service of the town’s local government. This stealthy embourgeouisement calmed down the more riotous elements in the annual festivities and encouraged the involvement of more respectable elements in the community, a process of reconciliation that continues to the present day so that official Lewes now embraces Bonfire with only slightly exposed misgivings. But local notables continue to dominate the ranks of the Enemies of Bonfire, and Paul V has had to share burning space with unsympathetic councilors, the editor of the town’s newspaper who printed a critical article, and a model of the civic bank that had the audacity to impose charges on one of the Society’s accounts. For all the talk of Popes and plots that surrounds Lewes, the truth is that the real emotional intensity of the event is parochial; the celebration of kings, martyrs and national deliverance is really a codified form of polite rebellion against the very neighborhood officials who represent the establishment that Bonfire reveres.

Will Bonfire survive? It faces obstacles both practical and cultural. The act of bonfire building is labor-intensive, requiring the active involvement of a large community in a somewhat thankless cyclical task that does not lend itself well to the skills or attitudes of incoming London white-collar commuters. Smaller bonfire organizations in Sussex and Kent have folded because of diminishing interest from new local residents; as a member of the threatened Ewhurst and Staplecross society says, “we do it to keep a body of people together, to keep the village alive”. Lewes faces no immediate decline in membership, but the spiraling costs of producing each event certainly present a growing challenge, as do the ever-more intrusive concerns of the police, medical, and fire safety authorities. Then there is the transfer of youthful allegiance from November 5 to October 31, a holiday given the crucial atmospheric support of the American movie industry (which understandably shows no interest whatsoever in the doings of Mr. Fawkes). As children have ceased to trundle hand-made effigies around their neighborhoods begging for “a Penny for the Guy”, so they have taken up the far more immediately gratifying practice of Trick-or-Treat. The disappearance of the last residual folk memories of the Protestant commemorative movement may see the Westminster plotters triumph yet. Or else, as one commentator suggests, the two celebrations will merge into one, each loosened from its discrete historical moorings but preserved by the ancient yearning to explode the night sky:

The British have invented an entirely new folk festival: a week of satisfying bangs and flashes which have lost all their historic purposes – except to defy the oncoming winter. They are neither purely Guy Fawkes’ night, nor Halloween ... instead there is something we might as well call fireworks week: a spontaneous outburst of religious enthusiasm, without any dogma at all.

“Without Dogma”? The overcooked Vicar of Christ might take issue with that. But then his November ordeal in Lewes has arguably always been subordinate to more prosaic concerns, a mere case of being the wrong Pope in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Kafka Explains the Recent Decline in Posts on His Blog

Kafka's diary, December 18, 1910:

If it were not certain that my reason for leaving letters unopened for days (even those with presumably unimportant contents, such as this one now) is mere weakness and cowardice, which hesitate to open a letter as much as they would hesitate to open the door of a room in which a man was waiting for me, possibly with great impatience, then this laying aside of letters could be explained much better as thoroughness. That is, assuming that I am a thorough person, I must try to prolong everything that possibly concerns the letter, thus to open it very slowly, read it slowly and repeatedly, consider it long, prepare a fair copy with many drafts and finally hesistate with the reply. All this lies in my power, it is only the sudden receiving of letters that cannot be avoided. Now I slow down even this in an artificial way, for a long time I do not open it, it lies before me at the door, it continually offers itself to me, I continually receive it, but I do not take it.

Burgundy

Am having my first dose of Waugh and having a fine time…

I rejoiced in the Burgundy. How can I describe it? The Pathetic Fallacy resounds in all our praise of wine. For centuries every language has been strained to define its beauty, and has produced only wild conceits or the stock epithets of the trade. This Burgundy seemed to me, then, serene and triumphant, a reminder that the world was an older and better place than Rex knew, that mankind in its long passion had learned another wisdom than his. By chance I met this same wine again, lunching with my wine merchant in St. James’s Street, in the first autumn of the war; it had softened and faded in the intervening years, but it still spoke in the pure, authentic accent of its prime and, that day, as at Paillard’s with Rex Mottram years before, it whispered faintly, but in the same lapidary phrase, the same words of hope.

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part IV

Part III
Part II
Part I

(Hat tip to Joan's Place).

The Toryish flavor of Bonfire has undoubtedly been encouraged across the years by the sponsorship of local Conservative brewing interests, who have had an indulgent attitude towards a ceremony that both panders to their politics and profits their hostelries. The nonconformist community, which one might assume to be in tune with anti-Papal rhetoric, has by contrast always suspected Lewes’ November 5 events as an excuse for superstitious drunkenness. Bonfire is a High Church affair.

There is no mistaking the triumphalist clarion of the Boyne in Lewes’ crescendo, a sound not lost on such present-day visitors to the festival as the Presbyterian hard-liner the Rev. Ian Paisley. But for all that flag-waving and No Popery there remains an abiding counter-tradition deeply embedded within Bonfire, a tradition that de-emphasizes the savage indignation of the powder plot executions and instead uses Lewes as an instrument of popular celebration and protest. This alternative reading relies not so much on the contingent circumstances of Jacobean intrigue as on the atavistic urge to make merry during the darkening autumnal evenings, to party away the ending of the year. The primitive attraction to winter festival flames was expressed by the Celtic holiday of Samhain, the predecessor to today’s Halloween; ecclesiastical watchdogs have been condemning the lighting of November bonfires since at least the Third Council of Constantinople in 680 AD . As Professor John Scarisbrick, one of Britain’s foremost Catholic scholars, recognizes: “It’s quite extraordinary how the Guy Fawkes thing caught on. It must have played on something very powerful in the English psyche”.

The make-believe, mock hierarchies and mimicry of Bonfire attest to its strong psychological connection to the older festivals of misrule that characterized the medieval calendar. There is a tradition of parodic ‘let’s-pretend’ that expresses itself in visual and semantic form; Lewes bonfire societies have developed elaborate, quasi-militaristic titles and officers, with Grooms in Waiting and Staff Buglers in attendance to Field Marshals, Inspector Generals and Chief Pioneers (a theme no doubt influenced by the strong links between the Victorian bonfire enthusiasts and the local Volunteer Army regiment). The counterfeit array of bishops that harangue the audience from their pulpits are an explicit jab at the Catholic elite, certainly. But they also make fun of uniformed authority in general, the drunkenness and absurdity of the clerics’ behavior tacitly ridiculing the dignity of organized power. The fancy dress, now an elaborate game of competitive group embellishment with amazing variety – one observer in the 1880s noted “Devils, clowns, pantaloons, Salvation Army representatives, Shakers, cavaliers, sprites, jesters, courtiers, troubadors, tambourine girls in Italian costumes, Zouaves, artillerymen, chasseurs, sailors and ” among the crowd - began as a means for troublemakers to avoid identification by the police. Even in these tamer days masquerade serves its purpose of licensing misbehavior, the revelers letting off steam in an effervescent atmosphere of beer and illuminations.

Other than just the opportunity to let rip and ignore conventional taboos, Bonfire also encourages more coherent acts of public complaint. Even at its most virulently anti-Catholic, the Lewes fete was as much to do with castigating the Establishment for its Papal backsliding as it was a celebration of the state’s legitimacy. The decision in 1850 to allow the Catholic hierarchy to re-establish itself in England was criticized in Lewes in the traditional combustible manner, and Bonfire has been punctuated ever since by protests that the Anglican Church is slouching towards Rome, recent victims of the flames including the former Archbishop of Canterbury himself, Dr. Robert Runcie. All a bit unsavory to modern liberal eyes, of course, but a reminder that the work done in Lewes is no less grass-roots disapproval of the behavior of those higher up than simply national self-congratulation.

To Be Continued

Red Dawn

Alan Hogue has an enjoyable screed up at Vox Clamantis reviewing the 1984 film Red Dawn.

I'm more charitably disposed to the movie than Alan seems to be, and confess that the last time I saw it I teared up a bit at the end (though I'm sentimental enough to have done the same over far worse). Alan's committing a bit of presentism when he describes the backdrop to 1983/84 with "the old familiar cold war threatened to go away and leave half the world wondering what to do next." That, however, is a mere quibble compared with his description of Red Dawn as marketed to "paranoid, gun hoarding militia members everywhere."

No, Alan, that movie has not yet been made. But there is a screenplay by a guy so far out there that he actually spells his name with a comma.

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part III

Part II
Part I

(Hat tip to Joan's Place).

As David Cressy (Bonfires and Bells, London, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989) has demonstrated, the origins of Guy Fawkes’ Night lay partly in the conscious inculcation of a set of approved patriotic demonstrations that would wed the English populace more closely to the Crown, to the Protestant religion, and to their self-notion of themselves as a free island people in constant danger of envelopment from the Catholic continent, their foreign enemies abetted by a Fifth Column of traitorous home-grown Papists. The older medieval calendar of Saints Days and indigenous festivals, some of which receded dimly into ancient Pagan rite, was slowly replaced by this new Authorized Version of more politically relevant ceremonies such as Coronation and (in the Restoration period) Royal Oak Days. Bell-ringing, torch-lit parading and the reading of pedagogical sermons was officially sanctioned to root the new customs into the popular consciousness, and pastors dwelt in length on the symbolic universalism of the Plot, not merely an attempt on the life of a King but a threat to the nation as a whole - a conspiracy of such diabolical comprehensiveness that no level of hyperbole could be unfairly reached, as Francis Herring showed in 1610:

The quintessence of Satan’s policy, the furthest reach of human stain and malice and cruelty, not to be paralleled among the savage Turks, the barbarous Indians, nor, as I am persuaded, among the more brutish cannibals.

The Gunpowder Plot was retroactively associated with the defense of England against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and as other examples of Catholic mendacity came forth so these too became elements in the celebratory mix. The thwarting of the Popish Plot and the successful carrying out of the Glorious Revolution added more proof of God’s peculiar favor towards his chosen people, as first evidenced by his staying of the assassin’s hand in 1605. At its best, Gunpowder Treason Day became a nationalizing cement that helped to create common cultural associations between the English regions; at its worst, it countenanced the kind of sectarian ugliness that burst forth in the Gordon Riots and can still be seen in the worst of the Ulster Unionists’ Orange Lodge ceremonies.

This dogmatic element has always been a part of the Lewes Bonfire tradition. The town still associates its November 5 celebrations with the memory of the 17 local Protestant martyrs executed during the pogroms of ‘Bloody Mary’ Tudor in the 1550s. The principal area of modern Bonfire activity, East Sussex and Kent, was by no coincidence a Puritan heartland after the restoration of the Protestant orthodoxy in Elizabeth’s reign. The English South Downs, looking onto the European mainland with no little trepidation, is rich in invasion lore. Its physical landscape of Armada beacons, Martello towers and anti-aircraft guns speaks of a centuries-long siege mentality in which the threat of foreign domination by Pope, Emperor or Fuehrer has been no abstract historical speculation but a real living presence in the community’s development. True to this spirit, Bonfire has always possessed a mildly jingoistic temper, originally a religious phenomenon but - as creeping secularization has doused the passions of theological controversy – increasingly expressed in nationalistic idiom. Guy Fawkes and his Pontiff have shared the stage with whichever other Aunt Sallies of the moment are deemed a threat to English liberties; Tsar Nicholas I, Napoleon III, ‘Oom Paul’ Kruger, Kaiser Wilhelm and Saddam Hussein have in their turn been honored with top billing in the festival of immolation. Even the significance of ‘Rome’ as a geographical target of Bonfire’s opprobrium has been deftly recycled in modern times. Now that city is a symbolic center not of Papal ambition but of the bureaucratic gnomes of the European Community, a point observed in a 1998 leading article on Lewes in the staunchly anti-federalist Daily Telegraph:

Even today, when the Holy See has long since abandoned its temporal claims, that symbolic resistance remains valid. British sovereignty is now threatened, not by zealots on behalf of the Bishop of Rome, but by zealots on behalf of the Treaty of Rome.

To Be Continued

Not Dead Yet

We've all heard the story about some state legislature declaring that pi equals 3. The October number of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly contains the following passage from a 1918 letter from the Panola County Council of Defense to the state council:

In answer to your Bulletin No. 56, the Panola County Council of Defense begs to suggest the following: An act of Congress declaring the German language extinct or dead, and providing further teaching of other foreign languages for the purpose of history only and this not being taught in detail but the mere historical fact that other languages are spoken and exist.

Diaries

Lately, when I'm not being vomited upon or doing laundry, I'm transcribing my great-great grandmother's diary. It's pretty simple, listing the comings and goings of her household and — outside of the rare mention of current events — is probably only of interest to the descendents of her family and neighbors.

I'm a sucker for diaries and memoirs. Until very recently, they were the only way I could stomach reading military history. The very best are written by strong personalities who are thrown into an unusual situation with time on their hands. I'm always interested in suggestions for good diaries to add to the collection, and will repay in advance by recommending The Journal and Letters of Phillip Vickers Fithian, 1773-1774.

Fithian is a New Jersey-born graduate of Princeton whose journal covers the year he spends tutoring the children of a large planter in Northern Virginia and studying to be a Presbyterian minister. He's an intelligent observer, and his diary has little bit of everything you could wish for.

He voices professional concerns on Tuesday, March 15, 1774

Bob however; for the present is frustrated in his purpose of learning Grammer, & it seems to chagrin him as much, as tho' he actually believed in what Mrs Taylor told him last Sunday, that without he understands Latin, he will never be able to win a young Lady of Family & fashion for his Wife.

A theme in the weeks preceeding Christmas is Fithian's acute embarassment at his inability to dance, and prickliness when it appears someone might discover him:

I was strongly solicited by the young Gentlemen to go in and dance. I declined it, however, and went to my Room not without Wishes that it had been a part of my Education to learn what I think is an innocent and an ornamental, and most certainly, in this province is a necessary qualification for a person to appear even decent in Company!

Possibly the best thing about diaries is the juxtaposition of the world-shaking with the mundane: Roosevelt elected President. I finished a quilt. This is how life really happens to us, even though we rarely remember it that way. Fithian's entry for Thursday, December 23, 1773 is a great example of this:

It is a custom with our Bob whenever he can coax his Dog up stairs, to take him into his Bed, and make him a companion; I was much pleased this morning while he and Harry were reading in Course a Chapter in the Bible, that they read in the 27tj Chapter of Deuteronomy the Curses threatened there for Crimes; Bob seldom, perhapse never before, read the verse, at last read that "Cursed be he that lyeth with any manner of Beast, and all the People shall say Amen." I was exceedingly Pleased, yet astonished at the Boy on two accounts. -- 1st At the end of every verse, before he came to this, he would pronounce aloud "Amen." But on Reading this verse he not only omitted the "Amen," but seem'd visibly struck with confusion! -- 2d And so soon as the Verse was read, to excuse himself, he said at once, Brother Ben slept all last winter with his Dog, and learn'd me! -- Thus ready are Mankind always to evade Correction!

This Evening, after I had dismiss'd the Children, & was sitting in the School-Room cracking Nuts, none present but Mr Carters Clerk, a civil, inoffensive, agreeable young Man, who acts both in the character of a Clerk and Steward, when the Woman who makes my Bed, asked me for the key of my Room, and on seeing the young Man sitting with me, she told him that her Mistress had this afternoon given orders that their Allowance of Meat should be given out to them to-morrow. --She left us; I then asked the young man what their allowance is? He told me that excepting some favourites about the table, their weekly allowance is a peck of Corn, & a pound of Meat a Head! --And Mr Carter is allow'd by all, & from what I have already seen of others, I make no Doubt at all but he is, by far the most humane to his Slaves of any in these parts! Good God! are these Christians?

Because Love Lives On

While most of you think you're too young to think about these things, it's never too soon to discuss with your partner just what a lovely diamond ring you could be converted to once the undertaker hands over the urn.

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part II

Part I

(Hat tip to Joan's Place).

It’s a conundrum for the interested historian. Bonfire provides an almost unique surviving example of this spontaneous parochial custom, an authentic folkloric work with genuinely entrenched roots in an otherwise bleak vista of recently installed ‘Heritage’ photo-opportunities and the other plastic eyesores of Merrie Olde Tourist England. It’s also a bastion of raging Political Incorrectness that sits uncomfortably within Tony Blair’s modernized, progressive, enlightened Cool Britannia. The image of costumed mobs parading fiery crosses through the night seems more reminiscent of Jim Crow Mississippi than the Home Counties, and indeed the arguments concerning Bonfire run in transatlantic parallel to the feud over the quasi-official status of Confederate insignia in the American South. Like their Dixie cousins, are the people of Lewes merely memorializing a collective folk tradition of common regional mores, or are they tacitly celebrating the triumph of intolerance and discrimination in a way that has disturbing contemporary resonance for such places as Rwanda, Bosnia, and Ulster? Does message trump medium in such a situation, no matter how furiously the actors distance themselves from the less palatable elements of their history?

Perhaps a way to reconcile the rich cultural investment in Bonfire with its anachronistic or inappropriate trappings is to consider how best to interpret the meaning of the ritual for its participants and its community. It is possible, and indeed there is good evidence to support this, to see Lewes as a particularly successful product of a 17th Century Establishment project to manufacture a united, dependable, and pliable national society through the deliberate scapegoating of a given minority – a product that continues to operate and offend despite its creators having long lost interest in it. However, it is equally viable to view Lewes as a winter festival of misrule in the medieval tradition, an opportunity for the local plebeians to cock a snoot at overarching authority made all the more subversive because the forms of commemoration are ostensibly cloaked with formal notions of loyalty and patriotism. In this sense, the present-day struggles between the town council and the organizers to impose and avoid increasing regulation of Bonfire are just the latest episode in an integral story of legality and resistance played out in a theatrical public forum. It could be that the two opposing interpretations of Lewes, jingoistic artifice imposed from above and popular rebellion emerging from the grass roots, co-exist and collide, their ideological friction providing the literal spark that gives Bonfire its emotional intensity and luminescence.

To Be Continued

Thoughts on Exploding Popes Part I

By way of a 'hello' after two months abroad, and in celebration of the 400th anniversary of Guy Fawkes' Day on Saturday, here is a little piece I wrote five years ago.

Every year, on the evening of November 5, the small town of Lewes in Sussex, England, is taken over by an extraordinary demonstration of public carnival known simply as ‘Bonfire’ – a mixture of Jacobean sectarianism, Victorian pomp, and modern-day pyrotechnics practically unknown elsewhere in the United Kingdom. Five locally recruited ‘Bonfire Societies’ muster in the High Street, surrounded by tens of thousands of spectators, and process through the main thoroughfare dressed in a bizarre collection of costumery: Zulus, Vikings, Mongols, American Indians, Siamese dancers, Renaissance aristocrats and stripe-shirted pirates, are to name but a few of the exotic specimens on display. Accompanied by military, jazz and youth marching bands, the celebrants pay homage at the town’s war memorial before continuing to parade with a medley of banners, tableaux, and gigantic effigies of historical and contemporary ‘enemies of Bonfire’. The theme is inflammatory; firecrackers erupt, blazing tar barrels are dragged on iron pulleys before being hurled into the River Ouse, and bonfires illuminate the skyline. A mock convocation of bishops gives a series of ex tempore sermons to the crowd, lambasting local and national figures for their supposed crimes. Finally the effigies are devoured by the flames, in some cases suffering the pre-combusted indignity of being blasted to pieces by internally placed fireworks. Among the regular victims of this faux execution are two stock villains from early-modern English demonology; Guy Fawkes, would-be assassin of King James I, and Pope Paul V, excommunicator of Queen Elizabeth I and chief bugbear of the militant Protestant tradition.

Bonfire is the most dramatic extant observance of an almost 400-year old English commemoration of the failure of the ‘Gunpowder Plot’, the pro-Catholic attempt to murder King and Government by the detonation of hundreds of pounds of explosives beneath the 17th Century Houses of Parliament. The forestalling of this attempted coup, which for over two centuries figured in the authorized calendar of liturgical thanksgiving offered by the Church of England, has customarily been a focus point for state-sanctioned anti-Catholicism and the presentation of English history as a ceaseless battle against Romish encroachment. That tradition has mostly lapsed. In the secular Britain of the millennial fin de siecle, now more observantly Muslim than Christian, the overt religiosity of Guy Fawkes’ Night has been almost entirely dropped or forgotten. It is the faint survival of that Catholic-bashing strain at Lewes, most visibly in the annual reduction of Pope Paul, that makes the festival so unusual, provocative – and, perhaps to some, so weirdly compelling. Controversy over Bonfire’s ‘No Popery’ has grown in recent years. Catholic priests have complained that the wanton burning of Popes is offensive. The Vicar-General of Arundel and Brighton, the Rev. John Hull, has guardedly advised that “the interest of all Christians is to ... look to the future, not the past”. An ecumenical organization, Harmony United, has been established to lobby for greater religious sensitivity at the festival. Bonfire organizers are recalcitrant. The Pope in question is not the present-day wielder of the Fisherman’s Ring, they argue, but a long-dead predecessor and a bad one to boot. It’s a bit of “harmless fun”, an innocent vestige of a long-cherished local practice. And besides, they don’t burn him. They blow him up.

To Be Continued