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Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 695
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: 
Votes: 1 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, December 01, 2008 - 08:32 pm: | 
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Hello All,
I am still here. I'm still reading. After finishing Tracy Price-Thompson's Gather Together in My Name, I read the fourth installment of the Artemis Fowl series. I love that series! While Harry Potter was getting all of the publicity, Artemis Fowl was the one that really delivered the goods. After getting my Artemis fix, I started and am still reading the Andrew Jackson biography, American Lion by John Meacham. I have always loved history. Early in grade school when the class was introduced to the Presidents, I became fascinated with Andrew Jackson. I don't know why. I don't know if my fascination had anything to do with him being the 7th president, or when lined up with the first group of Presidents he looked different, but he became my favorite President. Stranger still, my next favorite was James Polk, go figure. Even after I learned of all of the crap Jackson did and believed in, the glow, although dimmed, still shined bright. With me getting sucked into the political scene this year, my intrigue with Jackson was reborn and here I am knee deep into this new biography.
Now, my love of history is back with a vengence. When I was in college, the first time, I was a hair away from changing my major from engineering to history. I love old things. *winking at Cynique* I was contemplating becoming a historian. Being an historian is some exciting stuff, not only do a person get to read historical documents, but they get to do research, and not just in libraries, but get to interview people, investigate, literally become a detective. Afterward the person has to write it up, publish articles, write books. Utterly fascinating stuff.
If you ever wondered why I read some of the books I have, some that have truly been found off the beaten track, its because I'm a history buff. I love history, but one of the major negative with most history books is that they are boring as all Hell. So, I will go for a historical novel every time. Love historians who can make history fascinating to read, John Williams and Jewel Parker Rhodes to name just two. If you ever come across a historical novel that I might be interest in, drop me a line. |
Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 697
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 - 01:49 am: |
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Hello all,
Man, I tell you, these old white folks in history is a MESS! Yawl know I'm kneed deep now into this Andrew Jackson biography, American Lion. One, I see that the old adage that those who don't know their history is destined to repeat it. There's political situations that is eerily similar to DumDum Bush, the current Republican party, the elitism of so call "high society", and politics in general.
The DumDum Bush eyebrow raised moment is that Jackson believed that the President should be chosen by the majority of the popular vote and that if it comes a time where the President gets into office by NOT getting the popular vote that it would reek havoc for the US! HOW TRUE DID THAT COME OUT!!
The High Society tip: is funny and sad because it soon turned very serious when the upper crust wives of the Congressmen, Cabinet members, etc., snubbed the Secretary of Navy's wife because the wives believed she was a whore and did not measure up. The major society b_tch wrote, "I so hate a whore". Me too honey, me too. *LOL* And then there's this senator, Senator Richard Johnson. Senator Johnson for years had a common law marriage with a mulatto slave. He had no shame in his game, everybody knew it but he didn't give a damn. So when the common law wife died of cholera, he hooked up with another black slave. When he caught, or believed that the new "wife" was unfaithful, he sold her for "infidelity" and then took up with her sister! *LOL* What kind of low rent shit is this? These people are a HOOT!! When I read that, it reminded me of that line in the movie classic, The Lady Eve, when William Demerest told Henry Fonda, "I knew a guy that married the same woman four times...and then he turned around and married her aunt!" These people are a trip! |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 407
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 - 02:15 pm: |
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Thumper, Thanks for the info, I've never studied Andrew Jackson, however, while reading Faulkner's "Absalom, Absalom!" I became aware that to some literary scholars, the character Thomas Sutpen has come to represent aspects of Jacksonian democracy.
This quote, the only one that I photocopied, is from Parini's biography of Faulkner. What do you think of this interpretation?
Sutpen's arrival in Mississippi in 1833, when he buys the land for his plantation with the slaves he has brought from Haiti, acquires the resonance of myth. An outsider, he belongs to the new class of white men ascending into positions of power in the region. This class believed, to an extent, in Jacksonian democracy and "family values." They were liberal capitalists, bent on acquiring prestige and land. Their ruthlessness was masked by their cavalier pose, marked by old-fashioned courtesy in their treatment of women, their pretense of being heads of family dynasties. They were, in reality, outlaws of a sort, invaders from the East, not unlike the Old Colonel, Faulkner's great ancestor, who took Mississippi by storm.
The Old South at first resisted these incursions from outside, and even Sutpen was rejected by Jefferson's social elite, as General Compson {the father of Mr. Compson and grandfather of Quentin) recalls. Sutpen was actually arrested when he brought four wagonloads of presumably stolen furnishings into the county. It wasn't just the questionable origin or quality of the goods that upset them, "it was a little more involved than the sheer value of his chandeliers and mahogany and rugs." Compson thinks "the affront was born of the town's realization that he was getting it involved with himself; that whatever the felony which produced the mahogany and crystal, he was forcing the town to compound it." 19 Whereas the older Old South acted as a community, bound together by group needs and mores, Sutpen acted on his own, symbolizing a new breed of self-interested men who would take whatever they wished, consuming resources at will, refusing to give anything back to the society that provided them with a home, with goods and services, with the cohesion that makes a civilized life possible.
Only Miss Rosa's father, the icy and well-named Goodhue Coldfield, appears to understand that slavery is a curse and that everyone in the South will pay a price for this outrage against humanity. He decries the "shifting sands of opportunism and moral brigandage" 20 that characterize the new South in the years leading up to the Civil War. He himself makes a grand gesture by freeing his slaves himself once they have worked off what it cost Coldfield to purchase their services in the first place. Like most people who exist within an amoral capitalist culture, he marries expediency (the need to get the work done, at whatever cost) with morality.... [The analysis continues on the next page, but I didn't make a copy of it] |
Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 701
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 - 07:38 pm: |
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Hello All,
Steve: I agree with the comparsion to a certain extent. Sutpen and Jackson both share an upbringing in poverty. They both set out to become more. While Sutpen's mind was set on him achieving his "Grand Design", Jackson, while wanting the property and all the trappings, really wanted a family. I don't see Jackson, for instance, leaving a son behind for any reason, while Sutpen had no trouble leaving Charles Bon, therein lies the major difference between the two. |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 410
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, December 03, 2008 - 10:58 pm: |
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Thumper, Interesting, thanks for the reply. There was another highly-regarded book about Jacksonian democracy published this year: "Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson" by David S. Reynolds, author of "Walt Whitman's America" and a concise biography of Whitman. Both books are out on loan now.
I recognize Jon Meacham as the author of a recent NY Times piece on the candidates' (Obama and McCain's) favorite books. They both mention Hemingway's novel about the Spanish Civil War, "For Whom the Bell Tolls," which was also one of Ralph Ellison's favorites, but more interestingly, both candidates are fond of Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," which Albert Murray has written about. So I read it. There are no African American characters in it at all, not even minor ones. I also watched the 1949 movie version which won Oscars for best picture and best actor, however, it doesn't seem particularly southern.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/02/books/review/Meacham-t.html?_r=1
The character in Absalom, Absalom! who is undeniably Sutpen's child is "Clytie Sutpen," however, you name Bon, whose identity is somewhat ambiguous. That's okay, it's a point we differ on. However, I've always thought of the unfortunate practice of "miscegenation" (or rape) as a product of slaveholding in general, to which Jacksonians would not be immune. Am I wrong about that? Even Tolstoy confessed to exercising "squire's rights" on his female serfs.
Sutpen is from a family of poor dirt farmers in WV where Indians, as he describes them, were the only colored people, and they were under duress. I believe that Sutpen (who told General Compson who passed it on to Mr. Compson who told Quentin, who tells it to Shreve, along with new knowledge he has gained from Miss Rosa) describes WV as a kind of pure democracy, almost a meritocracy, without regard for wealth or status. It's not until his family moves to Virginia in the Jeffersonian Old South, that he becomes aware of distinctions of social class among whites based on wealth and property. When he tries to deliver a message he resents being told by the plantation owner's well-dressed black butler to go around to the back door and he comes to regard African Americans, though enslaved, as more privileged than poor whites of his social class. Isn't that grievance, regardless of merit, a historically-accurate one?
I've been meaning to read some Southern literature, so I followed All the King's Men up with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and now I'm reading To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. One of the main characters in the McCullers novel is a black doctor who happens to be a Marxist. Robert Penn Warren's protagonist Willie Stark is based loosely on Governor Huey Long of Louisiana. I guess you could call him a Jacksonian-style populist in the beginning, but then he becomes corrupted by his own power and influence. A Streetcar Named Desire is more recent, but the characters Blanche DuBois and Stanley Kowalski represent the Old and New South respectively, but in a different way than some of the characters in Absalom, Absalom!
Well, that's my limited understanding. |
Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 703
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, December 04, 2008 - 12:12 am: |
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Hello All,
Steve S: I have seen All the King's Men a couple of times. I tried to read the book and couldn't get into it. I was probably in one of my moods where I should not attempt to read any book but I forge ahead anyway. Not a good thing. The book is on the list for another attempt. You are correct, the movie or the book does not seem Southern. If you want to read a few Southern works, I have a few suggestions:
1.) Eudora Welty - is one of my favorite authors PERIOD. Check her out.
2.) Flannery O'Connor - I have read only a few of her stories and I love them! I keep praying that the unknown Flannery O'Connor novel would make an appearance.
3.) Erskine Caldwell - the two books that I've read of his is God's Little Acre (da Bomb) and Tobacco Road. Talk about some low rent stuff. I loved it.
And you are not wrong about Jackson, maybe, "exercising his rights" when it came to his female slaves. That is the one thing that is missing from American Lion. Meacham mentions that Jackson had slaves but he does not dwell on it at all. I am a little surprised by that because during one of his campaign the accusation that Jackson's father was black, which has led to the belief that Jackson is truly the first (according to the one drop rule) black president of the US. Meacham however simply states that Jackson's father was an Irish-Catholic immigrant. And as you know, white folks did not have any qualms calling folks the N word: Irish, Jews, Asian; but you know thanks to revisionist history most of these groups have conveniently "forgotten" about that.
Anyway, I do believe that Jackson, tiptoed across the lawn, under the magnolia tree, in the moonlight to get him a taste from the slave quarters. According to Meacham, Jackson did not have any female company during his time in the White House. I don't know about that. I find it suspect.
Absalom, Absalom!: Remember that when Sutpen got with Charles Bon's mother, she was the daughter of a sugar plantation owner and according to him, he did not "know" that his wife was an octoroon. How else could his behavior towards Bon be explained? Isn't the fact that although Bon "looked" white, Sutpen knew better. And then why did he want his other son to kill his sister's husband to be? Now, I could be wrong. I admit its been a while since I read Absalom, Absalom! and I'm going to have to reread it. |
Thumper
Veteran Poster
Username: Thumper
Post Number: 705
Registered: 01-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, December 04, 2008 - 01:57 am: |
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Hello,
Hey Steve, I misspoke about Flannery O'Connor writing novels. I just found out that she had written two novels. Naturally, I ordered them right away. *smile* |
Steve_s
Veteran Poster
Username: Steve_s
Post Number: 411
Registered: 04-2004
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, December 05, 2008 - 07:05 pm: |
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Thumper, I remember you mentioning Eudora Welty to me a looong time ago and I haven't forgotten. I've only read one short story by Flannery O'Connor and nothing by Erskine Caldwell, so I'll keep them in mind too.
I know almost nothing about Jackson so I may have to read either the Meacham biography or the Reynolds book. I remember reading in Andrew Delbanco's biography of Herman Melville that when Captain Ahab's harpoon is described as "hickory, with the bark still investing in it," Melville is playing around with the idea of the ceremonial hickory pole that was held aloft by Democratic party stalwarts at political parades, "the symbol of continuity from Andrew Jackson ('Old Hickory') to James K. Polk ('Young Hickory')" 
Lawrence Otis Graham's "The Senator and the Socialite," contains one of the bluntest examples I've read (besides Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl) of the supposedly privileged position of "house" slave -- the future Senator Bruce's mother was some type of domestic worker, either a cook or a "nursemaid" to the slaveholder's children -- leaving the poor woman vulnerable to coerced sexual relations with the master, the result being that he had an entire second family by the woman. Then when he died and she was tranferred to his brother, the future senator ended up with a whole new set of siblings by his mother and the new slaveholder. You know all this. In exchange, the children received a minimal education.
I've been reading William S. McFeely's 1991 biography of Frederick Douglass for a few weeks now, and it's an interesting book. It considers all three of Douglass's autobiographies - which are in some ways revisions of one another - as well as all his other writings and speeches, and fills in a lot of the blanks or places where he stretched the literal truth about his own life in the service of the greater truth, the abolitionist cause. I didn't know .
Henry Louis Gates mentions the McFeely book in his preface to the Dell paperback edition of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and now there's a new book called "Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln," about their interpersonal relationship, which Gates calls "a path-breaking work that dissolves traditional conceptions of these two seminal figures." I read a bit of the first chapter, "Privileged Slave and Poor White Trash," in the bookstore, and the summary of Douglass's early life is consistent with what McFeely describes in much more detail.
I put "Rails Under My Back" aside for a while, but now that I've picked it up again I'm enjoying it a lot more (possibly because now I know who all the characters are?). He is a really good writer. I read somewhere that he's now working on a historical novel about Thomas Bethune, also known as "Blind Tom," the young blind pianist born a Georgia slave in 1849. He played classical piano pieces from memory after one hearing, and although his genius transcended intellect because he was an idiot savant, he still broke down a lot of preconceptions about African Americans. He - or a character based on him - appears in Willa Cather's "My Ántonia," a novel that Zora Neale Hurston named as one of her favorites.
The NY Times included a jazz novel in their 100 Notable Books of 2008, and it sounded good so I ordered a copy. Here's the review by David Hajdu. Three paragraphs from the end where he talks about Art Blakey's recording of "Pensativa," I know exactly what he's talking about. In high school I listened to that record at my friend's house all the time.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/books/review/Hajdu-t.html |
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