Daisy Owl

My favorite Web comic, if you want to know. The humor reminds me of Dilbert before it became an unending series of work-sucks-and-my-boss-is-a-moron gags.

The uses of history

My current read is Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era, 1829-1877, the second volume of Walter McDougall’s highly skeptical and hugely entertaining take on American history. At a time when bookstores are cluttered with ideologically tainted pseudo-history tomes like Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and Bruce Bartlett’s Wrong on Race, it’s a tonic to read this passage – McDougall’s warning shot across the bow of anyone who wants to carry contemporary political battles into the past:

Who were the conservatives and who were the liberals in this second party system? If one adopts twentieth-century definitions it might appear that the libertarian Democrats were the conservatives and the statist Whigs the liberals. But in the parlance of nineteenth-century Britain, where the labels originated, the reverse would be true.

In regard to slavery, free-soil Whigs would appear the liberals and the Democrats supporters of a racist status quo. But in regard to workers’ rights as understood later in the century, neither party was “progressive.” In regard to ethnic and religious tolerance the Democrats would appear the liberals, since they embraced Catholics and immigrants. But in regard to education and social reform the reverse would be true.

The only way to get a grip on the growing divide among Americans in the mid-nineteenth century is to purge our contemporary notion of the political spectrum and try instead to imagine the ambivalent anxieties of a freewheeling people with one foot in manure and the other in a telegraph office.

This excellent NYRB piece places McDougall’s book alongside other recent works on Jackson’s administration, including Jon Meacham’s Pulitzer-winning American Lion, and ends up concluding that any talk of an “Age of Jackson” or “Jacksonian America” is wrongheaded:

Jackson was a divisive figure who polarized people and whose policies as president proved as often harmful as beneficial. Taking Andrew Jackson to typify early-nineteenth-century America does a disservice to our country’s history, which has many interesting aspects and admirable people outside the orbit of Jacksonian Democracy (originally the name of the Democratic Party, not a general characterization of the United States). Most Americans today consider the abolitionists heroes, though Andrew Jackson hated and feared them. Other candidates for present-day honor include DeWitt Clinton, mastermind of the Erie Canal, built by the State of New York; Horace Greeley, crusading journalist; Horace Mann, advocate of state aid to the public schools that would create a literate citizenry; Lucretia Mott, Quaker feminist; and the black polemicist David Walker.

Jackson’s partisan rivals the Whigs, often disparaged simply as snobs who couldn’t reconcile themselves to equal rights, actually have a strong claim on our respectful attention. The Whigs (their name was the traditional one for critics of executive abuses in Anglo-American history) understood the benefits of economic development and wanted government at all levels to promote it. They, not Jackson, endorsed federal government intervention in the economy. When the stock market crashed in 1837–1839, the Whig leader, Henry Clay, declared the American people “entitled to the protecting care of a parental Government.” The Democrats, led by Jackson’s chosen successor Martin Van Buren, insisted that Washington observe strict laissez faire.

As L.P. Hartley said, the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there. Understanding that is crucial before trying to drawing lessons from the past. Otherwise, you’re apt to come out looking like a fool — or, worse still, like Jonah Goldberg or Bruce Bartlett.

The anxiety of influence

J.R.R. Tolkien was seldom more amusing, and less convincing, than when he grumpily dismissed any attempts to draw parallels between The Lord of the Rings and Richard Wagner’s  The Ring of the Nibelung. The posthumous publication of Tolkien’s The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun – soon to take its place alongside The Children of Hurin and just behind The Silmarillion on the “Often Purchased, Seldom Finished” shelf of the Tolkien library — has resurrected the Wagner Question, and Jeff Sypeck deals with it head-on in this interesting post.

The Wednesday Westie

Sunday morning dogs-in-the-garden edition.

Bonus it’s-never-too-early-in-the-day-for-a-nap edition.

Next year in New Orleans

Kicking yourself for letting another New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival slip by? Yeah, so am I. Console yourself with these five books and start planning next year’s trip.

Puritan citizen Kane

Kane’s last vestige of reason snapped. He gibbered to and fro, screaming chaotic blasphemies . . . and he lifted his clenched fists above his head, and with glaring eyes raised and writhing lips flecked with froth, he cursed the sky and the earth and the spheres above and below . . . in one soul shaking burst of blasphemy he cursed the gods and devils who make mankind their sport, and he cursed Man who lives blindly on and blindly offers his back to the iron hoofed feet of his gods.

Ah yes, there’s nothing like Robert E. Howard in full lather. That’s one of the subtler passages from “Wings in the Night,” a 1932 novella published in Weird Tales that for sheer demented intensity outdoes just about every other story Howard pounded out during his brief life and briefer career as a pulp writer. I’m not going to tell you he was Proust, but if you have taste for this stuff, Howard had qualities that made him stand out in a disreputable genre. I also think that if he’d been able to make it through the depression ( and the Depression) that led him to commit suicide in 1936, Howard would have developed into a significant regional novelist and possibly something more. As it is, Howard’s decade of intense productivity showed him to be a seminal figure of the pulp era, capable of churning out blood-and-thunder stories in a variety of modes. I’ve already argued that if Dashiell Hammett warrants a Library of America volume, then Howard does as well, if only to recognize his position as a bridge between Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jack London.

Though Howard is best known for creating Conan the Barbarian,  I actually prefer the gory story cycle Howard built around Solomon Kane, a deeply conflicted Puritan who wanders the Earth righting wrongs and stamping out evil in both human and supernatural guises, along the way combining near psychotic religiosity with an appetite for righteous violence that would have Dirty Harry hiding under his bed.  I was a wee lad when Lancer Books started churning out paperback editions of the Conan stories, and after inhaling every available copy I was glad to find the Kane stories published in three volumes by Centaur Press, a boutique operation that had labor of love written all over it. It also had some intriguing cover art by Jeff Jones, who spent much of his commercial art career in the shadow of Frank Frazetta, though he had a sense of color and technique all his own. This cover painting from one of the Centaur Press volumes pretty much set the standard for depictions of Kane, much the way Frazetta’s covers for the Lancer books defined the image of Conan until Arnold Schwarzenegger came along.            

One of the most interesting aspects of the Solomon Kane stories is that several of them are set in Africa, which Howard imagined as the realm where harpies and other monsters of classical lore took refuge from the advance of Western civilization. Howard was a howling racist, but he also romanticized barbarians, and therefore his imaginary Africa was depicted with a curious mixture of condescension and respect. During his sojourns in Africa, Kane forms a guarded semi-friendship with a witch doctor who offers advice and aid in his dreams. And when Kane comes across a beleaguered African tribe caught between a domain of cannibals and a colony of revenant harpies, there is no question that he will do everything he can to help them. This help opens the tribe to a terrible reprisal that sparks the passage quoted above, and leads Kane to plot a spectacular vengeance that is not for the faint of heart.

The two Conan movies are pretty embarrassing, but I have to admit I’m intrigued by the prospect of the Solomon Kane movie that’s now being shopped to distributors. Instead of getting pulp fiction filtered through Quentin Tarantino, let’s get it straight with no chaser, right from the source. Cheers.

Space hoot

My interest in seeing the new Star Trek film is about as close to absolute zero as can be found in nature. But this Onion video report – “Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As ‘Fun, Watchable’” — is an instant classic.

Blue Monday

Though he’s probably best known as one of the creators of Mr. Magoo, animator and jazzbo John Hubley should be better known for the work produced through his Storyboard production company, which frequently blended jazz with inventive animated images. This 1956 short, Date With Dizzy, shows Dizzy Gillespie being cajoled to come up with music for some television commercials. Not only do you get to see three of Hubley’s TV spots, you get some real live Dizzy Gillespie music in the mix as well.

By any other name

Lord of the Rings auteur Peter Jackson is producing a remake of a brisk little World War II movie called The Dam Busters, which celebrated Operation Chastise, the May 1943 bomber attack by the RAF 617 Squadron on key dams in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s industrial heartland. It also presents a couple of big problems that could be ignored when the film was made in 1954, but could very well blow up in the faces of contemporary viewers and remakers.

It’s easy to see why Jackson was drawn to the story: it has all the ingredients for a special effects extravaganza, and the bombing sequences are pretty suspenseful. In order to get past the torpedo nets shielding the dams, engineer Barnes Wallis (played by Michael Redgrave in the 1954 film) designed a drum-shaped ”bouncing bomb” that literally skipped across the water to reach the target. If that weren’t enough ingenuity, in order to get past German antiaircraft batteries, the squadron came up with an ingenious system of downward-pointing spotlights that let the pilots gauge their height while flying low in the dark. The raid caused catastrophic flooding in parts of the Ruhr Valley, and as anyone who’s seen The Two Towers can tell you, Jackson and his people really know how to stage a good apocalyptic flood. 

Trouble is, in terms of its effect on the war, Operation Chastise was about as useful as the firebombing of Dresden. Most of the people killed by the flooding were slave laborers shipped in from Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, and the impact on German manufacturing was almost negligible — the dams were quickly repaired and the German war machine barely missed a step. Moreover, the necessity for repeated bombing runs gave German gunmen plenty of chances at the squadron, and of the 19 bombers sent on the mission, eight did not return. The courage and commitment of the airmen are beyond doubt, but the loss of so many lives for such a relatively small return raises legitimate questions about the operation.      

And then there’s the little problem of the squadron commander’s dog. It was called Nigger. Apparently Jackson still hasn’t decided what to do about the dog’s name. If you Netflix the film, you’ll find it really is jarring to hear the dog’s name used so casually, over and over.

Not that anyone’s asked me, but I’d tell Jackson to keep the name. For one thing, it’s historically accurate. (When the dog was killed in a traffic accident, the squadron used “Nigger” as their password, as a tribute.) For another, while there’s no doubt the right side won World War II — or that it needed to be fought, whatever Pat Buchanan may have hallucinated about Germany’s intentions — it will be refreshing to get a subtle reminder that there were some not-so-great things about the “Greatest Generation,” or that the “Good War” wasn’t all good.

Watching the Flickr flow

This shot of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan performing in August 1963 is just one of scores of remarkable photos taken by Dr. John Rudoff, a cardiologist who chronicled the Philadelphia folk music scene in the early Sixties before going to medical school. His collection, available on this Flickr page, includes shots of His Bobness traumatizing the 1965 Newport Folk Festival with his electric guitar. I’m particularly taken with this snap of Son House taken at the festival.