Well, we made it to Thursday, didn’t we? Yesterday was a good day. I slept really well the night before, didn’t have to get up early (and Sparky let me sleep an extra hour; he’s started getting into bed and cuddling up to me every morning around four which is nice), and had a nice doctor visit. I lost more weight–honestly!–and am now under 180, which has been since at least the late nineties that I weighed so little. I did stop at Raising Cane’s to get lunch on my way into the office, and it was very good and very filling. It was a slow day at the office, too, so I was able to get a lot of my Admin work caught up as well. I didn’t feel exhausted, either, which was super nice…and of course I work from home tomorrow and Monday is a holiday, so huzzah! I do want to slowly and carefully work on the house some more over the weekend, and keep building up my own strength.
I really hate being feeble, but my body has been through a major trauma and I’m older, so I need to get over my impatience and take it easy–which is hard for me, because I always see it as being lazy (thanks Mom and Dad!) rather than being something necessary. Maybe if I can get on a roll with my reading and start doing some more writing.
I started writing my essay about Gone with the Wind and how it basically is the Bible of Lost Cause Mythology, which also reminded me of an earlier, equally foul (if not more so) book that was also made into a successful film: Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, which was filmed as Birth of a Nation and preceded Gone with the Wind by a few decades, priming the pump, as it were. (I downloaded those books from Project Gutenberg, but can’t bring myself to read them.) I’ve really come to hate the Lost Cause myth over the years, but have to admit it’s not surprising that it was allowed to develop and become a horrible part of our history (and present) because stubborn Southerners refused to believe they were, or ever could have possibly been, wrong about anythin1g. (Yet they call themselves “the real Americans” now.)2
I slept well again last night, which is great; maybe uninterrupted sleep is going to be a thing for me again and praise Jesus and pass the ammunition, you know? Yesterday was actually a pretty good day, overall. I got a lot of work done at the office, always a plus to be ahead on my work, and we watched two more episodes of The Last of Us after I made dinner. I fell asleep in my chair instead of cleaning the kitchen the way I’d intended to, but I can do that when I get home tonight. Tomorrow is a work-at-home day for me, and of course that glorious three day weekend of rest, relaxation, and reading right behind it. Huzzah! I feel like I’m getting some of my strength back–a little, not a lot–and the process is going to be slow (I need to be more patient) and steady and hopefully by the end of the summer I’ll be back to some semblance of normality and weight.
And on that brief note, I will bring this to a close and head into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thor’s Day, Constant Reader, and I will be back at some point soon.
William Bradford Huie–a problematic journalist who committed some serious crimes by “protecting sources” in the Emmett Till case–wrote a book about the civil rights movement in north Alabama in the late 1960s called The Klansman, which showed three different perspectives–and the one from the bigoted police chief who does not believe he is a bigot is probably the best depiction of the Southern bigot mentality I’ve ever read; but the book is horrifically brutal and difficult to read. ↩︎
There are some excellent novels that show the horrors of what the Jim Crow South was like: The Reformatory by Tananarive Due; Time’s Undoing by Cheryl Head, and anything by Wanda M. Morris–all writers you should be reading. And yes, they’re fiction, but so is the Lost Cause myth. ↩︎
And suddenly it’s Sunday, and I go back to the office tomorrow. Paul leaves on Wednesday for ten days, so Wednesday night is going to feel really weird and off when I get home from work. No cat, no Paul, and that has the potential to be incredibly sad and lonely, if I allow it to go that way. I don’t think I’ll be able to manage just goofing off when I get home from work while he’s gone; not to mention the time we usually spend together every night. I will most likely finish watching My Adventures with Superman while he’s gone, and I’ll probably watch Heels on Starz, with Stephen Amell; obviously, it’s a drama series built around a local wrestling promotion–and since my current WIP does the same (it’s not about the promotion, but the promotion plays a part in the book), it couldn’t hurt to watch, right? I just have to be careful not to steal, er “borrow”, anything from the show. (I doubt I will; the promotion is really back story more than anything else.)
But yeah, next weekend is going to be weird as shit around here. I’ll have to get used to sleeping alone–always an issue for me; changes to sleeping situations never are particularly easy for me to adapt to, ever–and without Scooter to cuddle up next to me in the bed, it’ll be particularly lonely. Ah, well.
I started reading Kelly J. Ford’s The Hunt yesterday, and I have to say wow. From the very first page she pulls you into the story, and the authorial voice! Magnificent. I still haven’t read Real Bad Things, her previous novel, yet; I don’t want to not have another book by her to read (my usual author-fan neurosis kicking into gear) but I am also thinking I may read it on the plane to Bouchercon, depending on how far along I am with my TBR pile by then–I have, after all, books by Eli Cranor, S. A. Cosby, Alison Gaylin, Laura Lippman, and Michael Koryta to get through yet as well–but with Paul gone, I will either be reading or writing every night when I get home from the office, so maybe I can get a lot of this reading caught up on. I also want to read this original text version of The Mark on the Door (The Hardy Boys) so I can write about it, too. I was also thinking it might not be a bad idea to take some of these really old blog posts I never finished and copy them into Word documents…because they really are longer form personal essays that require more work than just what I think off the top of my head–I actually have to look things up and do research to be effective, and I can save them in a folder called blog essays so I know where they are when and if I decide to ever look at them or try to finish them because it bothers me that I have all these unfinished drafts saved on the blog–many of which I tend to forget about until I’m reminded when I see the draft, which isn’t exactly conducive to finishing it. There’s one particularly old one where I wanted to read and talk about Uncle Tom’s Cabin, probably one of the most famous books ever published in this country and one that actually effected societal change…but it’s undoubtedly, from the modern lens, incredibly problematic, which is why I wanted to read it. I also have an electronic copy of The Clansman, which is the book Birth of a Nation was based upon, which clearly is a problematical text; perhaps someday I can do a lengthy personal essay about both of those books, along with Gone with the Wind, in the context of the Lost Cause mythology I was raised to believe (never really did because I could never get past the evil that was chattel slavery, no matter how much any of the latter two authors tried to convince their readers that it was benevolent and better for the enslaved than freedom…even typing that, I can’t wrap my mind around the fact people believe that bullshit, or even more insanely, some still clearly do).
I also spent some time doing research into Filipino immigration to Louisiana (because I am looking into writing about them) in the eighteenth century as escapees from enslavement on Spanish galleons in the Gulf of Mexico. Louisiana truly is the melting pot I was taught growing up as a part of American exceptionalism; Louisiana had immigrants from all over the world and from every imaginable “race” (which is not biology but a social construct, and no one will ever convince me otherwise), from the Isleños from the Canary Islands to the Filipinos who settled at St. Malo just off the coast-line on the opposite shore of Lake Borgne from New Orleans–I am also interested in the idea that there was also a settlement of escaped formerly enslaved people in the East called “maroons”–not to mention the enslaved people brought here unwillingly from west Africa as well as the Caribbean islands. Europeans were well represented here by French, English, and Spanish; Jews also came over in the eighteenth century, as well as Germans (There’s a town called Des Allemandes–the Germans–on the west bank of the Mississippi, and an entire stretch of the river called the German Coast), and of course there are Cajuns, Armenians, Greeks and Americans, too. There is a quite large Vietnamese immigrant community in New Orleans East, too. I’ve always felt New Orleans had a darkness to her; the slave trade flourished here (New Orleans was what they meant by being “sold south” or “sold down the river”–and it was so bad those words and phrases were considered threats)…which also reminds me I should revisit Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, which I always recommend to people interested in reading about New Orleans and its history. All of the former slave states have a darkness to them, which is what I am exploring in my Alabama and Louisiana researches on now; how to incorporate that theme, of the suffering embedded in the blood-soaked soil and how so many souls cannot possibly be at rest.
That’s kind of what my revision of this nearly forty year old short story is becoming, and that’s kind of why I am stuck in the part I am at now; when the two boys are told the Civil War legend about the ghost of the cemetery. The original story was one that has since turned out to be apocryphal, a story my grandmother told me as truth when I was a child. I have found an equally bloody and horrifying legend based in the actual grisly history of the region from whence I sprang, and I am trying to get the tone right. I think the man telling the story to the boys would not have been a Union sympathizer but a Lost Cause believer, which makes telling the story and getting the tone right much more difficult. I think I’ve figured out the way to do it right–I don’t really care if Lost Cause sympathizers are ever offended by my writings about the South, to be perfectly clear if it wasn’t already–but I am of course worried that I’ll blow it so had to rest my brain and think about it some more yesterday. I also scribbled some backstory on my main character for the book I just started writing in my journal, which was very cool. After getting the mail and the groceries yesterday I was just drained–the heat really can suck the life right out of you–and so I just sheltered in the apartment and did some cleaning and organizing and thinking, really.
We watched two movies, Renfield and They Cloned Tyrone, both of which were quite enjoyable but completely different. I wasn’t so sure about Renfield, which I assumed was simply a modern take on the Dracula story from Renfield’s point of view, which I thought was a clever idea–but I didn’t realize it was intended to be a comedy. The female lead is Awkwafina–which I did not know and didn’t see her once in any preview of the movie I ever saw, which was some peculiar marketing. I wouldn’t have even thought twice about watching the film had I known she was in it–and she was amazing, as always. I am really becoming a fan. They Cloned Tyrone was a tech horror movie, filmed like a 70’s blaxploitation film, and it was interesting and clever and really smart (although part of it reminded me very much of an Edgar award winning novel from a few years ago that I loved) and we really enjoyed it before watching some more Nora from Queens before turning it in for the evening.
Today I am going to get cleaned up a bit, get ready for the week and do some writing. I want to get this short story revision completed as well as taking another shot at revising the third chapter of the WIP. I do need to do some more straightening and organizing–as always–and there’s a load of dishes in the dishwasher that need putting away. I am feeling better rested, which is lovely, and I am hoping to carry that energy, along with some positivity, into this new week. I do have some errands that will need to be run this week, alas, but I think most nights I’m probably just going to come straight home from work and either read or write or clean and organize. There will of course be nights when I am horribly lazy and won’t do a thing, but I am getting bored with being lazy and am feeling like I need to be producing in one way or another–making myself useful in my spare time. That of course is a neurosis in and of itself; the refusal to accept and allow myself to have down time where I am not doing something or anything or even thinking; sometimes I just need to mindlessly go down Youtube wormholes for the evening, and sometimes I even learn something when I do.
And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday however you choose to spend it, Constant Reader, and I will check in with you again later.
It’s Saturday, and I am feeling better. Yesterday was much better than Thursday; I drank a lot of fluids and didn’t seem to have any stomach issues; the headache came and went, and I coughed what probably was a normal every day amount of coughs–something in my throat that needed clearing–and while I did still have some fatigue and chest tightness, I was able to do some things as long as I took a break after. I did the dishes, and watched The 39 Steps. I did some laundry, and spent some time on Youtube. I moved necessary information from my old journal (now full) into my new one. We also watched Knives Out last night before retiring to bed, which we also enjoyed.
I did try to read, but it was tiring–awful, really, when you are required to stream for entertainment because it’s less taxing mentally–so I wasn’t able to do much of that. So, I put my fiction novel aside–Night Has a Thousand Eyes by Cornell Woolrich, and took down The Proud Tower by Barbara Tuchman, which is quite good; it’s her study of Europe in the generation/decades leading up to World War I. I had started it years ago and never finished–I don’t remember why, quite frankly–but was able to pick up again and read it here and there while I could focus. The lovely thing about non-fiction, and history in particular, is that you don’t have to worry too much about what came before where you’re reading if you pick it up again years later…history is history.
I also downloaded a copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which I have never read, and thought perhaps that I should; how does the book that many historians consider partly responsible for the outbreak of the Civil War because it so enflamed abolitionist sentiments in its readers (never, ever doubt the power of fiction to help bring needed change) hold up today? I’ve read some interesting pieces on Gone with the Wind–book and movie, both for and against lately–and that put me in mind of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I had reread a novel about the Civil Rights movement a few years ago that I read when quite young (The Klansman, by William Bradford Huie, a native Alabaman who taught at the University in Tuscaloosa; and the title was definitely a play on The Clansman, the novel Birth of a Nation was based on) and thought it even more powerful now than I did when I was a child; I saw the justifications of the horrific racist white people for what they were and it was plain to me, even as a child, that they weren’t the heroes of the story, even though they were the central characters of the book. So, I went to Project Gutenberg and downloaded a PDF of the book, and as I started reading the first few paragraphs…well, let’s just say the writing style is very dated and leave it at that. There’s also the use of the N word right there on Page One–which of course was common usage in the 1850’s and pretty much up until the 1950’s or 1960’s…and I started thinking that maybe someone should–since the book is now in the public domain–rewrite it and update for modern times? Or perhaps someone could do something like Alice Randall/The Wind Done Gone with it? Or perhaps it should best be left alone? The debate over these old books, primarily focused on Gone with the Wind lately, (and really, it’s mostly about the movie, not the book) and what should be done with and about them, is one I cannot make up my mind about. There’s probably a blog entry on that coming as well.
So far so good this morning. I don’t know if the fatigue is gone, but I slept for a very long time and very deeply. I still have a headache and my stomach is still bothering me this morning, so I am going to try keep putting in fluids since the dehydration issue seems to still be going on as well. There really are fewer things I loathe more than not feeling well, quite frankly. The weird issue with my stomach is that it literally feels tight and sore, like I did some kind of way too intense, way too long abdominal workout, and everything feels kind of bloated and gross? I’m not making that as clear as I should–use your words, writer boy!–but I’m not really sure what’s going on with it. I keep hoping it’s not anything serious, but…it’s still quite strange. The headache is coming and going; I’ll feel it for about fifteen minutes, and then it goes away before coming back. It’s not excruciating, more of a throb than anything else, and then it’s gone. Not enough to even take Tylenol over, frankly, but maybe I should; it might control it and keep it from coming back.
I’m hoping to have both the energy and the focus to write today; failing that, to at least read for a bit. When I finish this I have some emails to address–when do I not have an absurd amount of emails to answer–and hopefully can get most of that resolved before moving on to a highly productive day. One can dream, can’t one?
I have to say, I was really impressed with The 39 Steps. Yes, it was filmed in 1935 and yes, it’s rather dated now; but you can see how masterful Hitchcock was as a director. There’s not as much suspense in it–primarily due to the datedness of the movie–but it’s interesting, and I’ve always wanted to read the novel. I also found it interesting that Madeleine Carroll, who played the lead, was also the kind of icy beautiful blonde heroine Hitchcock gravitated towards for most of his career. But the concepts of the film–a man (played by Robert Donat) who unknowingly stumbles onto an espionage ring, and a female agent is murdered in his apartment, he is blamed and no one will believe the story he is telling; which she told him when he basically rescued her, and so he has to unmask the conspiracy in order to clear himself of the murder, is also Hitchcock’s favorite kind of story: what I call the “right man in the wrong place at the wrong time” kind of thing. Bourbon Street Blues was originally conceived that way, and let’s face it, almost all of the Scotty books really boil down to that simple concept–Scotty keeps accidentally stumbling into trouble. I do recommend it; other than being incredibly dated it’s quite fun to watch.
And if you haven’t seen Knives Out, you absolutely must. The crime is so amazingly Agatha Christie-like and complex that it’s like she wrote it herself, and the cast is magnificent–like those wonderful all-star film adaptations of Christie they started making in the 1970’s, like Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile (which I want to rewatch but can’t find it streaming anywhere). The cast is absolutely perfect–every last one of them–and I do hope this signals the return of these kinds of films.
And now, I am going to go to my easy chair and wrestle with Woolrich for a bit before answering emails and writing.
Saturday morning and I slept late, which felt positively marvelous. I feel rested and ready to kick some ass and take some names–at least for now, at any rate. Paul is going to be out of the house most of the day–appointments and going to the office–and therefore I have the Lost Apartment to myself for most of the day and no excuse not to get a lot of things done. I am still planning on walking over to the AT&T store to replace my phone–who knows how that is going to go?–but other than that, my day is pretty much set for cleaning, revising, and reading.
Last night, we started watching the new Netflix show The Umbrella Academy, based on the Dark Horse comic series–and while I didn’t madly love it, I am curious enough to continue watching. For one thing, it has both Ellen Page and Tom Hopper (who I’ve been crushing madly on since his days as Billy Bones on Black Sails), and it has an interesting premise. We will be continuing with it tonight, I think. I had just started reading Lori Roy’s Gone Too Long when Paul got home last night, and then was distracted by getting caught up on How to Get Away with Murder and then The Umbrella Academy.
And I’ve been dealing with yet another Apple upgrade issue that has fucked with my desktop, laptop, phone and iPad since last night. Now the cloud drive is missing from both my desktop and my laptop (I managed to resolve the handheld device issues last night) and so am trying to get that resolved this morning. Seriously, Apple–when you update/upgrade your systems, is it absolutely necessary to fuck up everything for your customers?
Seriously, Apple. Do better.
So I am trying to resolve all this before scheduling a call from Apple Support…which I also don’t understand; you used to be able to do this in an on-line chat, but now of course they make you take a phone call. Why, precisely? And how able-ist is this? What about those of us who are hard of hearing, or those who are deaf? Seriously, fuck you in the ass without lubrication, Apple. HARD.
Thank you for allowing me to vent about these issues, Constant Reader. It’s helping me reduce the future body count.
This week I got a copy of Kyle Onstott’s bestselling Mandingo from the 1950’s. As Constant Reader is aware, I’ve been trying to diversify not only my fiction reading but to learn more about the horrible history of race in North America. Part of this has taking an amorphous shape in my head around a lengthy essay, tracing revisionism of slavery and the Old South and civil rights from such novels as The Clansman (which was filmed as Birth of a Nation) to Gone with the Wind to To Kill a Mockingbird and The Klansman, which I recently reread. As I was scrolling through Amazon Prime looking for something to watch the other night, I came across the late 1970’s film Mandingo, and remembered that it was also a novel. I bought a copy from eBay which arrived this week (I wasn’t able to get far in the movie because it was just incredibly bad; not even campy bad, like Showgirls, just bad.) The book arrived this week and….just looking at the note from the publisher in the beginning was horrifying. Yet Mandingo might just be the only novel about slavery and the Old South that actually tears the veneer of respectability and gentility away and exposes the true horror of what the “peculiar institution” was actually like. (Even John Jakes’ dreadful North and South series never delved deeply into the actual horrors; Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad was one of the first novels to truly explore this that I’ve read.) Barbara Hambly’s Benjamin January series, set in New Orleans before the Civil War, also does a terrific job of exploring how deeply entrenched and horrible racism/slavery were.
This essay I am thinking about would probably wind up, should I ever have the time to read the books and write it (it would, for example, require a reread of Gone with the Wind and it’s over eleven hundred pages, as well as some in depth reading of actual history) would probably be a part of Gay Porn Writer: The Fictions of My Life…which is a project I really do want to work on someday. Mandingo takes on an aspect of slavery and the South that is rarely, if ever, touched on in fictions: the sexual abuse of the female slaves by their masters (come on, like it never happened. Really?) as well as the breeding of actual slaves for better, more valuable stock, as well as raising them for fighting–kind of a human version of cock-fighting or dog-fighting. Is it more likely that never happened, or that it did? Slavery, as Harriet Beecher Stowe repeatedly explained in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, debases both slave and master; are we really supposed to believe that slave-owners didn’t abuse their ‘property’?
Given how people of color–theoretically free and equal in the eyes of the law in the twenty-first century–are treated in the present day, I’m not buying the notion of the kind, gracious slave owner.
Take, for example, this passage from the Publisher’s Note to the movie tie-in paperback edition which I just received in the mail:
From today’s vantage point,, almost a hundred years after the cataclysm, the developing situation may be viewed objectively. Actually, the finger of blame should be pointed at no one geographical group of people. Although the factions that promoted the abolition of slavery were ethically in the right (emphasis: mine), Southern planters in general are shown to have been victims of circumstance rather than diabolical tyrants as they have sometimes been painted. (again, emphasis mine.)
Doesn’t get more apologetic than that, does it? Those poor planters. (massive eye roll)
And is it any wonder that we still have so many societal problems of racial injustice today?
Friday, and a new month. Rabbit, rabbit, and all that, you know.
Or did I mess that up by typing something else first?
I’m so bad at these things.
Anyway, it is now February, and Carnival is just over the horizon. Parades literally start three weeks from today. #madness
I am taking vacation during most of the parade season; the new office is too far for me to walk to and from, so I decided to simply take vacation and actually enjoy parade season for a change. I should also be able to get a lot done during those days–kind of like a mini-staycation (although I loathe that not-a-word and can’t believe I still use it from time to time). I also can’t believe the first night of the parades is in three weeks. THREE WEEKS.
Of course, as Facebook seems to remind me on an almost daily basis, Carnival is late this year. Usually at this time parades are rolling and the city is full of tourists and I am exhausted from walking and working and going to parades. So, yes, Carnival is later this year than usual and yet somehow…it still snuck up on me? Go figure.
I finished reading The Klansman last night, but as I did some things occurred to me–namely, for a book about the Civil Rights struggle and racism in Alabama, there sure weren’t many characters that were people of color. Yes, a book about civil rights and racism placed the white people at the center of the story. Admittedly, the book wasn’t aimed at or written for people of color; the audience was white people…but I can’t see racist white people in the 1960’s reading the book and not being outraged by its “sympathetic” depictions of people of color. The book also sports the trope of the white savior–the “good white man” who stands up for the people of color and therefore becomes a target of the Klan.
There’s a really good essay–and one I might try to write–about the arc from The Clansman (the horribly offensive novel that Birth of a Nation was based on; it’s actually available for free from Google Books) to Gone with the Wind to The Klansman and how Southern people and authors rewrote history to not just romanticize and glorify the Southern Cause in the Civil War, but also the Ku Klux Klan; and how those narratives have changed perceptions not only of the war and racism, and the South itself. The Klansman is an attempt to reverse that trend, but to expose racism in the Jim Crow South not as something romantic and necessary, but as an evil on par with the original sin of slavery itself.
William Bradford Huie (who also wrote The Americanization of Emily, The Revolt of Mamie Stover, and The Execution of Private Slovik) deserves a lot of credit for writing this book, despite its flaws. He was born and raised in Alabama, and still lived there when he wrote and published this book–which couldn’t have earned him a lot of fans in the state. I’ve read any number of books by white people that have attempted to talk about the Civil Rights movement–and there are always these heroic white Southern people who stood up to the Klan and fought for the rights of people of color at great risk to themselves and to their families; as well as pushing the narrative that the real racists in the South were the working class and poor whites, while the middle and upper classes wrung their hands with dismay but didn’t try to do anything. I think that narrative is false; white people aren’t the heroes of the Civil Rights movement by any means. And while class certainly played a huge part in Jim Crow and the codification of segregation and racism into law; I find it really hard to believe that more financially stable white Southern people weren’t racists. I first encountered the class discussion in David Halberstam’s The Fifties (which I do highly recommend); but while I do believe the class discussion has merit–and discussion of class/caste in America is way overdue–I don’t think it completely holds water, or holds up under close scrutiny.
Ironically, Jim Crow and codified racism is part of the reason the South lags so far behind the rest of the country economically.
We continue to ignore class in this country at our own peril, quite frankly.
I am going into the office early today to get my four hours out of the way, and then I am going to go run errands so hopefully I won’t have to leave the Lost Apartment this weekend. I hope to get all the cleaning and organizing done today, and then I am most likely going to either read Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress or Caleb Roehrig’s White Rabbit, which I am picking up at the library today. I also am going to tackle some Stephen King short stories this weekend, rereading Skeleton Crew. I need to get back to work on both the Scotty book and the WIP this weekend; I also want to do some short story revisions so I can send some more stories out for submission. I also have some other projects in the beginning stages I’d like to organize and plan out.
And on that note, ’tis back to the spice mines. Have a terrific Friday, Constant Reader!
Queer and Loathing in America 