I have a lot of respect for Tony Woodlief, so I’m going to share his book promo video with no more knowledge of the book than what you see here. It’s probably a darn good book.
Category Archives: Non-fiction
Sent to Erase a Man Only to Become Haunted by Him
Tin Doom 😑 on Twitter: “I may regret sharing this, but I have a very personal story I would like to tell. I hope it doesn’t get too long… Anyway… I was 20 years old when I was sent to erase a man from existence and became haunted by him.”
In over 50 tweets, Doom shares his story of clearing out a man’s house and finding his life in photos. If you get to a tweet that reads, “I closed the last album and sat for a long time on the closet floor, resting my head back against the wall,” that’s not the end of the thread. Select the link to view more replies to see the rest of it.
Modern Trauma, The Song of Roland, and Sci-Fi Realities
Micah Mattix is back with the new Prufrock newsletter. Subscribe and read higher. Today’s email links to an essay about trauma being a product of our modern age. From that essay, “Furthermore, I will argue that trauma is so widespread precisely because of the ubiquity of traumatogenic technologies in our societies: those of specularity and acceleration, which render us simultaneously unreflective and frenetic. On this analysis, the symptoms deemed evidence of PTSD are in fact only an extreme version of a distinctively modern consciousness.”
Hierarchies in Space: Alexander Hellene writes about boring, fantasy bureaucracies in science fiction. “Captain Kirk is the ultimate pulp hero, a man of action and passion who takes his duty to his crew so seriously he is consistently willing to die for them. Does this sound like a guy who could function on the society of the future dreamed up by Gene Rodenberry, et al.? No wonder Kirk wants to be in space all the time.”
Snapping is crazy fast, researchers at Georgia Tech have concluded, and that means Thanos could never have done that snappy thing he did. Fact-checkers for the win!
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great French poem “The Song of Roland” on BBC4’s In Our Time.
World Magazine’s next issue is their 2021 books edition.
Photo: Modern Diner on Dexter Avenue, Pawtucket, Rhode Island. 1978. John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.
Black Friday Sales and Wangerin First Editions
Black Friday has become synonymous with the spirit of Thanksgiving and growing corn by planting fish in the ground. It’s as American as a payday.
The Rabbit Room is holding a Black Friday all month for the sheer joy of it. Of particular interest to our readers may be these first editions of author Walter Wangerin.
Not to be outdone by a warren of artists, Banner of Truth is offering good discounts on many Puritan paperbacks and other fine volumes.
The weird Western tale of Russian Bill
I reviewed John Boessenecker’s Ride the Devil’s Herd the other day. The book is an impressive account of the deadly conflict between the Earp brothers, Virgil, Wyatt, and Morgan (note how I list Virgil first – he was the oldest of the three, and I’m an oldest too. We oldests have to stick together) and the rustler gang known as the Cowboys.
The book includes many interesting anecdotes, some of them surprising, some of them shocking, some disillusioning. One story amazed me. It’s one of the weirdest western yarns I’ve ever read, and I’m amazed I’d never heard of it before.
There was a member of the Cowboys known as “Russian Bill” Tattenbaum. He was an educated man of about 30, older than most of the other cowboys. He spoke French, Russian, Spanish, and English. He dressed expensively, with gold pieces on his buckskins, a silver hat band, and silver-plated, ivory-handled six-shooters. He had a reputation as a blowhard – he bragged about his crimes and depredations, but was considered all hat and very little cattle. One of his brags was that he was a European nobleman. Nobody believed that any more than his other tall tales.
He was finally arrested by a deputy and jailed in Shakespeare, New Mexico, in an adobe hotel, along with another Cowboy named Sandy King. According to newspaper accounts, they were “loud and demonstrative in their threats against the citizens, declaring that the people of the town would have an opportunity to dance to their music inside of twenty-four hours.”
At 2:00 a.m. the next morning, a group of local citizens, faces masked, overpowered the guard, took the pair to the bar room, and hanged them from a ceiling joist. Sandy King, according to witnesses, went to his death with dignity, but Russian Bill “begged for his life,” claiming he hadn’t committed any crimes at all, and was really a Russian nobleman who’d fled his native land because of a love affair. The vigilantes, neither convinced nor impressed, let Russian Bill swing.
A coroner’s jury the next day declared their deaths “suicide.”
Here’s the payoff:
…Five months later, in April 1882…, Sheriff Harvey Whitehill received a letter from the U.S. consul in St. Petersburg, Russia. The consulate had been contacted by a Russian countess whose son was in New Mexico and had not written to her since the previous May. The consul wrote… that the missing man’s name was “Waldemar Tethenborn” and provided his photograph. It was Russian Bill. Sheriff Whitehill replied to the consul and, to spare the mother’s feelings, reported that her son had committed suicide.
‘Ride the Devil’s Herd,’ by John Boessenecker
Notions of personal honor aside, a clash between the Cowboys and lawmen was inevitable. Since November 1878, the Cowboys—from Bob Martin to Curly Bill to the Clantons and McLaurys—had been largely unopposed. On the border the Cowboys had bullied and raided and smuggled and robbed. They had killed anyone who dared oppose them. They had, prior to that fateful October day, murdered at least thirty-two men in New Mexico, Arizona, and Mexico.
Over the years, I’ve read a number of books on the Earp brothers and the OK Corral gunfight. To be fair, plain “debunkings” of the “Earp myth” have grown rare of late. Writers tend to concentrate on the ambivalence in the historical record. The Clantons and their Cowboy allies look bad, but the Earp brothers look pretty bad themselves. Writers find it hard to take sides.
John Boessenecker, author of Ride the Devil’s’ Herd, has no such problem. He reports on the Earps’ corporate and individual transgressions with perfect candor (as far as I could tell), but makes a valuable contribution by doing a job most historians have skipped – he clearly documents the long and bloody history of the Cowboys who were the Earps’ enemies. And balanced in that scale, he has no problem siding with the Earps.
I’d always assumed that the horrific first scene of the movie, “Tombstone,” was an example of cinematic hyperbole – like the entirely fictional opening to “Braveheart,” designed to get us to hate King Edward I from the git-go. But although the specific incident of the wedding massacre never happened, it’s entirely consistent with their habitual behavior. The Cowboys’ history as a criminal organization went back to the 1877 Salt War in Texas. The Salt War, a fight over mineral rights to salt in dry lakes, was a vicious racial conflict between Anglos and Mexicans, and the Cowboys took the opportunity to give full vent to their cravings for theft, rape, and murder. Afterward they mainly specialized in cattle rustling, primarily stealing cattle in Mexico and selling them in the US, though they were perfectly willing to do it the other way around when convenient. They also stole horses, robbed stagecoaches, and walked off with anything not nailed down. They could be charming when they wished to, but made sure to beat or kill anyone they thought might not fear them sufficiently. These were not the “rustlers” of the northern range wars, small ranchers resisting being bulldozed by the big cattle interests. They were, in fact, a terroristic organization. They scared off capital investment, and more than once they precipitated diplomatic crises between the US and Mexico.
The Earps, when they arrived in Tombstone, Arizona, were not a respectable family. They were gamblers (not above cheating), and had been confidence men, horse thieves, arsonists and pimps. A couple of them still were wanted in other states.
But (at least as author Boessenecker portrays it), they came to town intending to turn over a new leaf. Gambling was considered a respectable occupation on the frontier, and as a group they’d built a reputation as formidable police officers. Their record for courage is remarkable, and they were men with “no back-up in them,” as they used to say. They couldn’t be intimidated. They were exactly the men to take the Cowboys down. And that, they came to hope (especially Wyatt), would make them respectable at last.
The rest is history. The proximate reason for the gunfight at the corral was trivial, but the conflict was essential to the time and place. The Earps (as the author sees it) were the necessary implements of civilization to remove a deadly social cancer.
Boessenecker sees Wyatt Earp’s Vendetta Ride in much the same way, but more extreme. By now Wyatt had acquired a Deputy US Marshal’s appointment, and he possessed legal authority to arrest the men who killed his brother Morgan. Instead he chose to murder them. He didn’t trust the Cochise County sheriff, his enemy John Behan, to keep them locked up for trial (Boessenecker defends Behan’s record, however, saying he was never complicit with the Cowboys, only friendly with some of them). Wyatt’s means were illegal, immoral and “in the worst tradition of American law enforcement.’ But they were effective. When he was done, the Cowboys were broken, never to rise again.
Just like in the movies.
I enjoyed Ride the Devil’s Herd very much. The writing wasn’t of the top rank, but it did the job of communicating the narrative. There were lots of interesting anecdotes along the way, and good photographs, well placed in the text. Sources are well-cited. If you’re a Western buff, Ride the Devil’s Herd is well worth your time and money.
‘The Body Keeps the Score,’ by Bessel van der Kolk
After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system that has an altered perception of risk and safety.
Some years back I read about a new psychiatric diagnosis called Complex PTSD. The idea is that symptoms displayed by children who’ve been subject to abuse over long periods of time are very similar to symptoms common to adults who suffer from PTSD due to trauma, as in combat. The difference is that the Complex kind is harder to treat. This is of considerable personal interest to me, for reasons I won’t detail here.
Somebody on Facebook mentioned this book, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk, and I was intrigued enough to buy the Kindle version. Turns out Dr. van der Kolk is one of the researchers who came up with the idea of Complex PTSD (which has not to date been accepted for the APA’s book of recognized diagnoses).
The major argument made in this book is that many of our psychological disorders rise from trauma, and that trauma actually makes physical changes in the brain. Current treatment tends to lean toward drug therapy, which (the author argues) only masks the problem. What we need to do is help people to retrain their brains, to reorganize the various areas of the brain to work again in a normal fashion, instead of the abnormal ways they’ve adopted in order to cope with shocks they’ve suffered.
A number of treatments are suggested and evaluated, based on Dr. van der Kolk’s extensive personal experience as a clinician and researcher. These include yoga, biofeedback, and participation in drama.
I found the book largely persuasive (as if I were qualified to judge). I absolutely agree about Complex PTSD. I’m not so sure of the author’s strong defense of Suppressed Memory – he defends it strongly, but completely ignores the numerous cases where it has been used to persecute innocent people, such as day care workers. As a Christian, I’m dubious about yoga.
And the author spoiled it to some degree, for this reader, by his political conclusions. He sees it as self-evident that what will really solve our social problems is national health care and government preschools. I am personally doubtful that bureaucracies are ever going to fill our lives with empathy and caring.
The author is also prone to fall into the refrain of, “The medical establish has never appreciated my genius.” That does raise skepticism in this reader.
But most of the book is convincing, and all of it is worth reading. Recommended, with cautions for disturbing subject matter.
We Live in Technopoly
Carl R. Trueman writes in a debut World Opinion article that Big Tech is working us over and we could barely care less.
“Parents who still think the educational choice they make for their children is the most critical decision they make are sadly mistaken. That they decide whether their children can have smartphones is likely of more importance. “
He doesn’t invoke Neil Postman’s name, but he does repeats ideas I heard from Postman first. We think of technology as assisting us, as doing our bidding, but when we ask our tech what it would like us to do, then we surrender to the tech in our hands and begin to live in a technopoly.
Trueman says technology “mediates reality to us, and in doing so, it reshapes how we imagine the world and our place within it.”
‘Act One,’ by Moss Hart
It is a childish game I have always played and have never been able to resist—a game of arranging life, whenever possible, in a series of scenes that make perfect first-act or third-act curtains.
Wikipedia’s biographical article on Moss Hart, author of the autobiography, Act One, includes what seems to me a very telling detail. In the book, Hart describes his relationship with his aunt Kate, an eccentric semi-delusional who fancied herself a grand dame. She shamelessly sponged off her family, dressed in an affected “fashionable” style assembled from other people’s cast-offs, and was devoted to her nephew Moss. It was she who introduced him to the theater (cheap seats, of course), and who nurtured his fascination with that world. In the book, Hart tells how Aunt Kate died, tragically, while his first produced play was in rehearsals. She never knew of it, because he’d saved it as a surprise.
In actual fact, according to Wikipedia, Aunt Kate lived on for some time, becoming increasingly eccentric. Finally she turned on her nephew, breaking in on his play rehearsals and wrecking scenery. Once she set a fire backstage.
Now that I’ve finished Act One, it seems clear why Hart “edited” this scene of his life. The whole book is a lesson in storytelling. The truth spoiled the mood of the act, so he fixed it, as a good playwright does.
Moss Hart was born into an impoverished Jewish family in New York City (not apparently a religious family – they celebrate Christmas and he speaks occasionally of his love for lobster). His immigrant grandfather had come from a prosperous English family, but broke with them and emigrated. When his profession (cigar making) fell to automation, he was left without a living, a severe humiliation. Young Moss was the child on whom he lavished his attention. After his death, Aunt Kate took his place.
Thanks to Aunt Kate, Moss knew he wanted to be part of the theater, a ticket out of the poverty he hated, though he wasn’t sure what he’d do in the business. He tried, and abandoned, acting. Eventually he and a friend took jobs as social directors at a Jewish “summer camp,” an established cultural tradition in those days. These jobs were mostly about arranging entertainment, and Moss learned a lot, eventually becoming the best paid social director in the old “Borscht Belt.” But then he came up with an idea for his first comedy. Without his knowledge, a friend sent the play to the Broadway producer Sam Harris, who amazed him by calling him to ask if he’d mind collaborating with George S. Kaufman to bring the play up to professional standards.
George S. Kaufman was like a god to Hart. The rest of the book is a journey through the writing and production process for that single play. They “fixed it,” and tried it out in Atlantic City. The audience liked the first act, but it went downhill from there. Convinced they still have a salvageable show, the pair plunge into re-write after re-write, as out-of-town audiences continue to fail to find it funny. Then Kaufman gives up. Hart despairs. And then he has an inspiration and persuades Kaufman to give it one last re-write before the New York opening in four days. Then the big payoff.
Act One is a brilliant drama, disguised as an autobiography. I’m not sure how much to trust it in terms of facts, in light of the Aunt Kate episode, but the mechanics of storytelling are exemplified beat for beat, and they work wonderfully. Act One is a fascinating, amusing, bittersweet and ultimately triumphant personal story. It’s a masterful short course in plotting for a writer in any discipline.
Highly recommended.
‘The Viking Heart,’ by Arthur Herman
In short, a clear thread may connect the Viking sokemen of the Danelaw to the intellectual ferment that produced the Petition of Right of the English Parliament in 1628 and, ultimately, the Bill of Rights in America.
There seems to be something essentially un-Scandinavian about blowing one’s own horn. One hears of – and is often amused by – the Irish braggart or the German braggart. But we rarely hear of Scandinavian braggarts. Not due to any ethnic superiority, but because of our ingrained cultural habits.
The makes Arthur Herman’s The Viking Heart a slightly awkward book to read, at least for fellow Scandinavians. (Herman explains that after he wrote the book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, a Norwegian uncle asked why he’d ignored that side of the family, so there seem to be exceptions.)
I’d heard the author interviewed on the radio, and got the impression that this was mainly a book about the Vikings. But it’s not. Though the Vikings get much of the page count, the author goes on to describe Scandinavian history (at home and overseas) up to modern times. We read about the Normans, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, the Swedish pioneers in colonial Delaware and New York, Charles Lindbergh and Norman Borlaug. The executives of both Ford and Chevrolet who engineered US industrial mobilization in World War II were both Scandinavian-Americans. Gutzon Borglum and Carl Sandberg. The list is quite long.
The ongoing theme is the titular Viking heart (sometimes also the Viking Legacy, a title already taken. Herman might have consulted that book profitably). The Viking heart seems to be a pretty amorphous concept, but in the end he identifies it as physical courage, commitment to cultural identity, “the instinct of craftsmanship” (a phrase from Thorstein Veblen, who grew up about 10 miles from my childhood home), Christianity (after the conversion, of course), “the Lutheran work ethic,” the power of individual freedom, and “a constant willingness to strive toward unknown frontiers in order to find a place for oneself and one’s family.”
I’m not sure how different that makes the Viking heart from a lot of other ethnic groups’ hearts – the Scots-Irish, for instance, could claim a lot of those traits, and they carried them off with more flair.
As always, when it comes to a subject about which I know quite a lot, I have nitpicks. There are a lot of minor errors in the chapters on the Vikings. The author doesn’t go as far as some historians in rejecting the evidence of the sagas, but he tends to find things credible that I doubt, and doubt things I consider pretty plausible (such as the existence of King Harald Finehair of Norway).
On the plus side, he is far more positive about Christianity and its cultural influences than many current historians.
He judges it a failing of the Scandinavian countries that they never fully adopted feudalism. That’s something we Norwegians have always been pretty proud of, in point of fact.
The book is quite long. I did learn things from it, when the story moved outside my wheelhouse. I appreciated it, but I’m not entirely sure the whole exercise was necessary.
That’s probably just my Norwegian diffidence talking.
Recommended, for those interested in the subject.