skygiants

The thing about Joyce Milton's The Yellow Kids: Foreign Correspondents in the Heyday of Yellow Journalism is that yellow journalism is pretty definitively unethical but it also does make for some extremely good narrative.

-- I didn't get much of the unethical thing from the book, for the record. This is a BYOER (bring your own ethical reservations) text, for the most part; the book is broadly more interested in recounting the Adventures Of journalists in and around the Spanish-American and Greco-Turkish wars of 1896-98 rather than pursuing any broader analysis of the implications of American journalists running around playing the roles of not just propagandists but also in some cases activists, spies, and paramilitary professionals. It's a collection of historical anecdotes and snippets of biographpy strung together, sometimes to confusing effect (I personally wish Milton would warn us when she's about to switch to referring to people by their nicknames) -- but dang, the anecdotes are fun!

Milton's personal favorite yellow journalist is Sylvester H. "Harry" Scovel, a pugnacious World reporter who famously got in a public fistfight with the commanding general of the Spanish-American war on the day that victory was announced. Scovel apparently became a personal friend of Cuban general Maximo Gomez and, in addition to writing a lot of scathing pieces about Spanish abuses in Cuba, did a certain amount of conveying messages to the rebel camp from the U.S. government; unsurprisingly, he was arrested multiple times by Spanish officials as a spy and very nearly executed.

(One of the best primary-source anecdotes in the book involves two friends of Harry Scovel's -- one reporter and one soldier-of-fortune working for Gomez -- who set out on an ill-advised prison rescue attempt, got halfway there, realized they weren't going to make it, and instead got very drunk in a jungle cabin and wrote maudlin letters to their imprisoned friend, then apparently stole each other's letters and started ragging on each other in the margins:

[the soldier-of-fortune, in the margins of the reporter's letter] By the way, this Rea is a holy terror. How long have you known him? He is even now standing on the table and telling me (or trying to) the length of time this war has been going on.

THIS IS SO CUTE. I hope the letters did make it to Scovel and that they cheered him up enormously; they would have me.)

In between running around Cuba setting bad precedents for journalistic immunity, Scovel married a beautiful society wife, who promptly insisted on coming with him to Alaska to cover the Yukon gold rush ... after which he had to abandon her in the Klondike when he went on a temporary trip into town to find a telegram waiting from his boss saying that he had to catch the next train home or he'd lose his job. Where's my movie about the 1890s socialite surviving a solo sojourn on the Yukon trail?

Anyway. Speaking of socialites, my favorite yellow journalist is Cora Taylor, a Boston socialite turned baronet's wife turned runaway bride turned high-class bordello madam turned war correspondent -- Cora was still in the runaway-bride-slash-bordello-madam phase of her career when she met Stephen Crane (author of The Red Badge of Courage) in Florida, and upon beginning a Grand Romance they somehow managed to talk the Journal into hiring both of them to cover the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. They also rescued a puppy named Velestino from the battlefield:

The need to have someone to look after Velestino when Stephen and Cora returned to the front became the justification for hiring two teenage servants, the Ptolemy twins, who themselves required more looking after than the dog. And even with two full-time babysitters, the puppy kept getting lost until [Harry] Scovel bought it a collar and a leash, a solution that does not seem to have occurred to Cora or Stephen.

I also want a movie about this household. It should be directed by Wes Anderson, probably.

On a rec from nextian I relatively recently read The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During The English Revolution.

This was a dense but fascinating book that assumed about 200% more background knowledge about the English Civil War (1642-1651) and subsequent Commonwealth period than I have ever possessed, but some of it I was able to put together from context and some of it sent me down various Wikipedia rabbitholes and some of it I just accepted I was not going to understand and kept on reading.

My extremely surface understanding of the Civil War & Restoration period has always been 'fun-loving but politically & ethically untenable Catholic Royalists vs. egalitarian but devastatingly fun-hating Protestant Republicans, leading to an absolute null sum of a revolution in which I personally do not feel capable of rooting for anybody.' However, Marxist historian Christopher Hill has now made the English Civil War a thousand times more enjoyable for me by positing that in fact many of the fringe movements within the Parliamentarian Roundhead party were sort of early radical communists who wanted to tear down existing social institutions, establish communal property, and start leveling some hard questions directly at God, and also had a lot more fun than the traditional dour image of bourgeois Oliver Cromwell Protestants who disapproved of dancing & the theater &cetera.

Hill quotes from numerous philosophers, scholars, and interested citizens posing questions like "Where is your God, in heaven or in earth, aloft or below, or doth he sit in the clouds, or where doth he sit with his arse?" He devotes time to Levellers, a popular movement for broader suffrage and religious toleration; Diggers, more extremist Levellers who believed in common property and made a movement of squatting on privatized land and planting crops there; and Quakers, whom he argues were significantly more politically radical in their early days and moved away from those views as a survival tactic for the movement when the window for religious toleration began to narrow. His particular favorite is Gerard Winstanley, a Leveller/Digger philosopher who set out a whole set of principles for a model communal non-hierarchical society with universal education in which property and wages have been abolished:

The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land.

(to quote nextian: "i get that real "enjolras is talking" vibe off the guy")

And he did his job, I now absolutely want to read a more specific Winstanley bio; however, my actual favorite quote is from an alchemist who 'hoped in 1645 that 'within a few years,' thanks to alchemy, 'money will be like dross', and so 'that prop of the antichristian Beast will be dashed in pieces ... These things will accompany our so long expected and so suddenly approaching redemption.' This blew me away! I've read/seen so much fiction about alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold for ill-advised personal gain but WHERE is all my fiction about alchemists attempting to turn lead into gold so they can overthrow the global economy and institute an egalitarian society?

I was about halfway through writing my Yuletide fic this year when I realized that I was spending enough time stopping to check references that I really needed to just stop and read a whole book on the Russian Revolution to refresh my memory of the atmosphere and the timeline.

I ended up with Caught in the Revolution: Witnesses to the Fall of Imperial Russia, which I already had open in a Google Books tab to track info about how people even got to Russia from the States in the middle of WWI to begin with. (John Reed is appallingly short on information about his travel arrangements in Ten Days that Shook the World. Tell me about your steamer ship, John!)

My feelings about this book were a little mixed because, on the one hand, I have a certain amount of doubt and discomfort about the project of framing the events of the Russian Revolution entirely through the eyes of Relatable Westerners who were there at the time, and on the other hand research-wise it was in fact exactly the book I needed to write this fic ... so I'm very glad it exists, I just very strongly feel that it should not be anyone's only exposure to the events of the Russian Revolution, especially since -- while the socialist journalists who traveled to Russia to report on events are included in the very broad roundup -- the authorial POV seems much more closely aligned with the diplomatic staff whose primary concern was Making Sure Russia Stayed In The War without much empathy or deeper understanding for what was driving the Bolshevik movement in Russia.

That said: I did very much enjoy reading this book, and ended up semi-liveblogging it in a series of group chats because I kept wanting to post snippets of it and couldn't for Yuletide Secrecy. The book covers the events of the year 1917, from the overthrow of the Tsar through the aftermath of the October Revolution, and does its best to at least dip in on any of the American, British and French visitors who recorded memoirs of their time there, from moderately famous people like Emmeline Pankhurst, John Reed, Arthur Ransome and Somerset Maughan to people living through the day-to-day as bank staff, nurses, and significantly less famous reporters (including the only known account from a Black American during the Russian Revolution, who was there working as a butler to the American ambassador, which is fascinating although the author makes some choices around dialect that I would consider dubious.)

I was really charmed by the endnote wherein Helen Rappaport enthuses about how deeply fascinating all her subjects were and asks that any of their descendents contact her personally if they happen to read the book, she would just love to know any more of their stories! This is relatable and I do actually just want to read half the memoirs that she cites, especially Red Heart of Russia, written by Bessie Beatty who was one of several socialist reporters bouncing around Petrograd in 1917 and whom I liked so much I gave her a cameo in my fic.

Some personal favorite anecdotes:

- the prima ballerina who complained that just enough people turned up to the performance on the night of the February revolution that they couldn't go ahead and cancel, WHY, WHY ARE YOU PEOPLE STILL AT THE BALLET
- the French ambassador who, whenever invited to a party in the early days of 1917, would go home and write darkly in his diary that there had ALSO been PLENTY of gaiety in Paris on the night of 5th October, 1789! ... but then as soon as events started being broadly compared to 1789 came home and wrote snootily in his diary that REALLY it was more like 1848. Revolution connnoisseur!
- the account of a nurse who saw "one fierce officer, covered with decorations and looking very much annoyed, try to saunter down the Nevsky, pursued by a crowd of women who stripped him of his arms. His sword fell to a gray-haired woman who shrieked apparently uncomplimentary Russian epithets at him as she contemptuously bent the sword over her knee, broke it in two, and lightly tossed it into the canal"
- the bank teller who, upon being informed that the Bolshevik coup was likely to happen on a certain date, went ahead and pushed back the date when he was supposed to move apartments by three days to avoid intersecting with it ... only to have the coup delayed by three days and end up moving apartments on the day of the coup, again. This is so horribly funny and relatable, one could so easily imagine being this person ... is what I wrote in the late days of December 2020 and it is, of course, even more true now.

And, I mean, the situation that we are currently living through here is in many ways not at all comparable to 1917 Russia, but for its flaws in viewpoint this is in many ways a book about what it is like to live day-to-day, to have a job (or not) and housing (or not) and ordinary personal concerns while large and traumatic events are occurring around you, which is certainly a thing one understands better now on a visceral level than when one first started reading about the Russian Revolution ten-odd years ago.

For most of the past week I've been out of the city of Boston for the first time since the quarantimes began, and I spent a significant chunk of that time reading out loud from Leo Marks' Between Silk and Cyanide to genarti and my parents whenever any of them would sit still long enough to listen.

Between Silk and Cyanide is a memoir by Leo Marks, who in 1941 was deemed too much of an unreliable misfit to go work at Bletchley Park and as a result was instead sent to SOE to handle the cryptography of their various sabotage operations in Europe.

Some relevant facts about Leo Marks:
- he was Jewish and absolutely petrified by the prospect of facing combat
- his parents owned a moderately famous used bookstore
- after the war he went on to become a playwright and screenwriter, which means that the book is extremely entertainingly written but also one has to cast a slightly skeptical eye at some incidents of dialogue that seem perhaps slightly too cinematic for reality
- in 1941 he was 21 years old, which means that one spends a significant percentage of narrative clutching one's face and screaming "CHILD!" as, for example, in his initial interview for the position:

He began the interview by asking what my hobbies were.
"Incunabula and intercourse, sir."
It slipped out and wasn't even accurate; I'd had little experience of one and couldn't afford the other.

AN INFANT.

(Later on, he gets assigned to visit Cairo on Top Secret Codes Business and is petrified by the prospect of telling his adoring parents, who are convinced he's not capable of going across the city on his own, let alone leaving the country. "They need to have their heads examined, sending a baby to that awful place," wails Leo's Mum, of a youth currently responsible for overseeing all cryptographic traffic sent between London and SOE agents parachuted behind enemy lines.)

Anyway, immediately upon arriving at SOE headquarters, the Infant Leo becomes appalled by the lack of security and danger to the agents of the poem-based codes in use at the time, and embarks upon a one-man crusade to a.) develop better cryptographic methods and b.) convince his superiors that resources ought to be devoted to them. His methodology is often very funny and extremely twenty-one-years-old of him -- at one point, for example, he comes up with a cunning plan to force someone to read his report by marking it 'TOP SECRET,' leaving it in an unlocked drawer, and promptly reporting himself for breach of security protocols -- and you often understand all too well why Marks' superiors and coworkers are frequently furious at the obnoxious wunderkind who keeps barging into their offices and yelling that everything they're doing is wrong and bad.

With all this said, Leo's first most endearing quality as a writer is that he is not only witty and self-aware, but also more than happy to make himself the butt of the joke and admit his own shortcomings, failures, and hubris, as well as occasional highly relatable moments of slapstick. The second and far more significant one is that all his efforts are clearly driven by a profound conviction and sense of personal responsibility about the fact that bad cryptographic protocols are killing agents, and as funny as the book is much of the time, it's also very clear that Marks was and remains deeply haunted by SOE's losses. Several significant SOE figures show up over the course of the book, but some of the most space is reserved for Noor Inayat Khan, Violette Szabo, and Leo's friend F. F. E. Yeo-Thomas, all of whom were captured by the Gestapo in France. (On a lighter note, he also spends a lot of time tearing his hair out over Einar Skinnerland, whose cryptographic traffic is as sloppily coded as his clandestine achievements are heroic.)

Aside from the Ongoing Quest for Better Cryptography, the other main thread of the book is Marks' conviction that all SOE agents in Amsterdam have been captured by the Germans, based on the use of their secret security checks followed by the subsequent implausible perfection of their cryptographic traffic, and his deep frustration and panic about the fact that his superiors will neither do anything about it nor allow him to tell anybody else. The parts of the book where he talks about having to keep a professional face when providing briefings to officers that he's convinced are being dropped straight to their deaths are incredibly affecting. By the time the war ends, a now twenty-five-year-old Marks is significantly less of an infant, and deeply and understandably exhausted by both cryptography and the vicious politics of war.

(It's worth noting for the sake of independent verification that none of Marks' reports about this issue survive in the war archives, so the only source for Marks' ability to detect the deception in Amsterdam before the rest of SOE is Marks himself. Relatedly, Marks claims that the only report of his that does survive to the present day was a youthful attempt to understand cryptography through a Freudian perspective titled "Ciphers, Signals, and Sex." Given that a full chapter of the book is dedicated to one of Marks' colleagues attempting to explain the 'awkward time of the month' to him as it relates to his mostly-female codebreaking team while he makes the confused math face, one doesn't put a lot of stock in his conclusions but one does expect it to be hilarious. Alas, attempts to recover this important document have apparently failed.)

Anyway. Highly, highly recommended for anyone who's at all interested in this particular period of history -- thank you to sovay for reminding me that I've been meaning to get around to it.

You know, the thing is, it's not even that I have a particular pre-existing interest in WWII spycraft -- or at least I didn't, before I started reading Ben MacIntyre -- it's that I have consistently found people who write about WWII spycraft to be really good narrative nonfiction writers with excellent primary source research, a relative minimum of un-sourced speculation, and a solid sense of the ridiculous. All rarer than you might think! Except, apparently, among the subset of historians who specialize in narrative nonfiction about British intelligence agencies during the war.

Anyway, I just finished Operation Columba: The Secret Pigeon Service, a really in-depth look into the British use of homing pigeons for intelligence and counterintelligence, and while I really didn't intend to livetweet another book so soon after Amy's Eyes I just enjoyed the pigeon facts so much ...

The actual objective of Operation Columba was to drop homing pigeons in occupied France, Belgium, and Amsterdam, armed with rice paper, tiny pencils, pigeon-feeding instructions, and a survey questionnaire about a.) any top secret information the pigeon recipients might wish to share and b.) the quality of BBC radio service in their area. (I understand the tactical importance of the latter during wartime, but it remains particularly delightful to me as a public-media-adjacent professional.) Despite the dangers, quite a lot of people did actually write back via pigeon post, and the author is determined to make the argument that the information they provided and the services rendered by the pigeons were key to victory in Europe.

The book is more or less split between the bureaucratic details of the pigeon service on the British side -- a riveting tale of pigeon politics and hobby drama, featuring, among other elements, a gay occultist Baron, a pair of Girl Guides, and accusations of national secrets splashed in Racing Pigeon magazine -- and the much more dramatic story of a group of Belgians who picked up a pigeon early on and were inspired to form themselves into a proper spy ring, making beautiful secret maps in the hopes that they could eventually get a second pigeon to send them to Britain.

(...instead, Britain parachuted in a couple MI6 spies to make contact with them ... who were greeted with a general sentiment of "nice to meet you? but where are our pigeons??" At least, this is certainly the tone conveyed by author Gordon Corera, who also very clearly feels this way about MI6.)

As a result, the book itself manages to be both a compelling narrative about ordinary people running great risks to express resistance under occupation, and an extremely funny account of Weird Wartime Activity. Gordon Corera absolutely cannot resist a single opportunity to make a pigeon joke -- the book is littered with phrases like "pigeons were low in the pecking order of intelligence requirements" -- and to this I say, with all my heart, more power to him. Write what you love!

I leave you with this image of a 'pigeon bra', for parachuting in troops with as many pigeons strapped to them as possible:

About this time last year, innerbrat and I went to go see a play about Darwin at the Natural History Museum in London. From this play we learned that a.) the good ship Beagle was just chock-full of complex emotional tension between Darwin and his captain and b.) there was a whole other story about kidnapped Tierra Fuegans returning home from England on the Beagle of which both of us had been entirely unaware.

Then last month I found Evolution's Captain in a thrift store, which was all about Captain Fitzroy and the kidnapped Fuegans, and I would guess probably served as a major source for the play we saw; most incidents in the Fitzroy-Darwin relationship appear to have been taken directly from history and were indeed fraught with a great deal of complex emotional tension!

More or less all the elements of the intense Fitzroy-Darwin relationship that happen in the play, and several that were not, turn out to have been documented directly in primary sources and lovingly recounted in this book:

( Cut for people who do not care about Emotional Tension on the Good Ship Beagle )

Peter Nichols is clearly a guy who's a big Age of Sail nerd (at one point, hilariously to me, he describes the Beagle as halfway between the size of Jack Aubrey's first ship and Jack Aubrey's second ship without providing any other referents) and fascinated by the relationships between people in the particular pressure-cooker of long sea voyages, and he tells this story well and compellingly.

Unfortunately I don't think he's nearly as good at handling the racism and colonialism that is also an integral part of this story: the narrative of the four Tierra Fuegans -- two adult men, one teenage boy, and one nine- or ten-year-old girl -- that Fitzroy kidnapped on his first trip to South America, brought to England for a year of "civilization", and then returned to Tierra Fuega along with a missionary on the Darwin voyage, in the hope that they would help to spread good English values among their people.

This story is also deeply fascinating, in its horrifying way -- and it's not that Nichols doesn't know that it's horrifying, but he's also trying to tell this adventure yarn about the Age of Sail, and the fascinating and troubled Captain Fitzroy, and he wants you to like and feel sympathetic to his protagonist, which not infrequently tips over into a degree of 'and how sad it was for Fitzroy that his vision and plans for the Fuegians were so misguided!'

So, you know, sometimes you do get some very clear-eyed statements that missionary projects in the British Empire were just the first step towards a genocidal colonialism, and other times I wanted to quietly take Peter Nichols aside and explain to him that just because you airquote "savages" the first time you use it does not mean you keep on getting to use it throughout your entire book and assume we'll know that you don't mean it. Also, I think it's fairly telling that Nichols never actually bothers to give us the Fuegian names of the kidnapped Fuegians, and only ever refers to them by the names Fitzroy bestowed upon them. Wikipedia knows their names! It's not difficult information to come by!

(He's also honestly not great about Fitzroy's depression; we don't get anything much more nuanced than a fairly glib "mental illness ran in the family.")

All of which is to say that I'm glad to have read the book and learned much more about the story -- and I will say that Nichols is fairly good most of the time at parsing out the actual facts from speculation, and pointing out when we only have a single source or point of view for the way a certain event went down -- but: caveats.

Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners was a book club pick and not an ... entirely un-useful one? I'm not an expert by any means, but the information presented was (so far as I could tell) well-researched and solid and contained several tidbits of which I had not been previously aware! The prose style, on the other hand was ... well, could be a feature or a bug, really, depending on preference.

Okay, so the premise: you, the reader, are a hapless romantic who dreams of time-travelling to the Victorian era. Therese Oneill, the author, has been tasked with gently disabusing you of the notion that the Victorian era is a pleasant time in which live by taking you on a tour of unpleasant facts about hygiene, grooming habits, gender roles, etc.

As a person who in no way needed to be convinced of the fact that the Victorian era was not a pleasant time in which to live, I found this ... occasionally grating. "I KNOW!" I found myself shouting at the book (but, like, silently, and metaphorically, not in public.) "CHAMBER POTS ARE GROSS! I'M AWARE! - oh hey, people used corn husks as toilet paper sometimes? interesting factoid, thanks! - OKAY PLEASE STOP ACTING LIKE I DON'T KNOW WOMEN'S SEXUALITY WAS STRICTLY POLICED BECAUSE I DO IN FACT KNOW!"

(Sidenote: I say 'Victorian' but the book actually hops blithely back and forth between British and American social mores and historical factoids without much differentiation, which bugs me a little -- different things were happening in the Victorian era and the antebellum/Civil War/Gilded Age across the Atlantic! English-speaking social history is not a monolith! -- but, to be fair, is a thing Oneill announces she's going to do in the introduction so I can't say I wasn't warned.)

At one point genarti asked how the book was, so I read her a little bit out loud. "Oh," she said, "it's like BUCKLE UP TWITTER in book form!" Which I think is a helpful analogy -- if that style of LET ME EXPLAIN YOU A THING prose works for you, you may enjoy this; if it's not your thing, this book probably will not be either.

I read Stacy Schiff's The Witches: Salem, 1692 not because I'm particularly interested in the Salem witch trials, but because I liked her nonfiction prose style in the Cleopatra biography she wrote well enough that I was interested in whatever subject she chose to write about.

I felt like I had a fairly reasonable grasp on the key events going in, both from reading some books as a kid and from cultural osmosis -- hysterical teens, Tituba, stressed-out Puritans, distressed accused grandmothers, "more weight!", Cotton Mather sticking his nose in every which way -- and most of the things I vaguely remembered did indeed turn out to be accurate, though I appreciated in general Schiff's strict adherence to facts rather than speculation, and careful attention to gaps in the historical record. I also appreciated the breadth of her scope, and how she places the witchcraft scare in context; she draws a detailed portrait of the pre-existing stressors and small-town politics of Salem Village (a town so rancorous that they kicked out three ministers in ten years, one of whom ended up accused of witchcraft despite living an entire state away, and nearby Actual Salem Town wrote to them multiple times in the pre-witchcraft years to be like "PLEASE STOP ASKING US TO MEDIATE YOUR ARGUMENTS, WE'RE TIRED AND WE DON'T CARE") but also of the broader context and how Massachusetts politics may have influenced the reaction to the crisis. (It is notable -- a fact I did not know -- that the witchcraft trials somehow mysteriously slowed their roll after the governor's wife was accused.)

Maybe most of all I liked how she wrote about the little we know of the aftermath -- it's horrible but fascinating to think about all the people who accused each other at the height of the crisis and then had to spend their ENTIRE LIVES running into each other awkwardly at the store.

Schiff is particularly interested in the Nurse clan, and successfully managed to get me interested in them as well; Rebecca Nurse was an apparently much-beloved seventy-something great-grandmother whose family (unlike that of most other victims) unilaterally rallied around her when she and her sisters were accused of witchcraft and immediately started a HOW DARE YOU ACCUSE GRANDMA petition. The jury originally acquitted her! The judges were like "ummm maybe rethink that," and alas, Rebecca Nurse was executed, along with her sister, Mary Esty, who wrote a very polite letter to the judges asking that they perhaps reconsider executing any more witches after her.

Unsurprisingly, the Nurse family spent the next decade Still Mad About Grandma (And Great-Aunt Mary). They collectively refused to attend church until Samuel Parris the town minister (a prosecutor in the trials and related to several accusers) publicly apologized, which he refused to do for years, and the feud went on until finally it resulted in Parris getting forced out of his position; score one for the Nurse clan. On the other hand, the next minister reorganized church seating arrangements so that they had to sit next to the other family that accused Grandma of being a witch. So it goes. I was describing this to attractivegeekery and genarti and they pitched me the idea of a black comedy show about small-town sniping in seventeenth-century Puritan America, in which it is only gradually revealed that the small town is Salem and the reason Ann and Mary keep getting into fights over floral arrangements on the church beautification committee is Still Because Of That Time Grandma Was Executed For Witchcraft.

All that said, I have one major complaint about the book, and that is that for all her broad scope, Schiff somehow completely avoids some topics that I think are really quite relevant, like, for example, slavery in Puritan America. We spend a little time on Tituba; it's impossible, in writing a book on the Salem witch trials, not to spend a little time on Tituba; I still have no idea how common or uncommon it was for a man like Samuel Parris to have slaves, what their position and status would have been in Salem, and what context they themselves might bring to the witch trials. Similarly, Schiff spends a fair amount of time on the fact that the colonists lived in fear of attacks from the local tribes, and no time at all using her undeniably clever prose to contextualize or complicate Puritan Ideas about Indians.

We do, however, get some perspectives from the local Quakers. They appear to have spent the entire time period of the Salem Witch Trials filled with a deep sense of schadenfreude, and I think anyone who read The Witch of Blackbird Pond would agree that honestly that seems fair.

Okay, I'm going to start by ssaying that I'm glad to have read the new Shirley Jackson biography, Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life -- it's extremely thorough, consistently interesting and has a great deal of respect for its subject -- but also, I have some bones to pick with it. I'm sorry, Ruth Franklin, you did a lot of work and I'm glad you're so fond of Shirley Jackson! I am too! I learned a great deal from your book, thanks for writing it!

...and now, the beef:

- Ruth Franklin really wants there to be two villains in Jackson's story, her mother Geraldine and her husband Stanley Hyman, and ... I'm absolutely not saying these two people were great people or treated Jackson wonderfully (Hyman especially not) but I feel like Jackson's relationship with Geraldine in particular seems more complicated than Franklin wants to make it, even from the snippets of letters that are included in the book

- and while Ruth Franklin is certainly dedicated to the Feminist Take and the Horror of Housewifery and, like, I sympathize, also it feels a little ... reductive? ... to imply that so much of Shirley Jackson's incomparably weird fiction can be boiled down to mother issues/husband issues

- on a related note, the biography spends a lot of time talking about Shirley Jackson's (and also her husband Stanley Hyman's) weight, and -- I mean, it's relevant, Shirley Jackson eventually had health problems of which she died, but it feels like we're getting updates on her size about once a chapter and I don't care that much and I kept getting slightly weirded out by the fact that Franklin cared that much

- meanwhile, Franklin teases in a very early chapter insights derived from Shirley's year-long correspondence with a kindred spirit housewife who wrote her a fan letter, and then when we finally get there spends a chapter discussing this VERY INTENSE letter-writing relationship which the housewife eventually dropped for Reasons Unknown, and doesn't even present a theory as to why or show us any text from the last letter that she read but never responded to? MORE TIME ON THIS, LESS TIME ON LOVING DESCRIPTIONS OF ALL THE HOUSES THAT SHIRLEY'S GRANDFATHER EVER BUILT

- ok so Franklin quotes this page from Jackson's college diary:

my friend was so strange that everyone, even the man i loved, thought we were lesbians and they used to talk about us, and i was afraid of them and i hated them, then i wanted to write stories about lesbians and how people misunderstood them, and finally this man sent me away because i was a lesbian and my friend was away and i was all alone

and Franklin's analysis:

although characters who may be lesbians appear more than once in her fiction, Jackson -- typically for her era and her class -- evinced a personal horror of lesbianism. It's possible that the relatively extreme way in which she would later disparage lesbians reflects some repression on her part, especially considering that she and Hyman had several close male friends who were homosexual. But that is conjecture only. Jackson never spoke of experiencing sexual desire for women. When she refers to herself and Jeanou as lesbians in that piece, at a time when lesbianism was little discussed or understood, she seems to be using the idea of it as a metaphor for social nonconformity.

Okay, look: I have not done extensive research into Jackson's life. I am not going to try to argue with Franklin about whether or not Shirley Jackson was queer. It's for sure possible to read the above as 'this man sent me away because [he thought] i was a lesbian'. But are you seriously really going to try to tell me that when Shirley 'Introducing Dreamy Gay Theodora' Jackson wrote 'everyone thought we were lesbians' she didn't know what the word meant? Because I DO NOT BELIEVE YOU, RUTH FRANKLIN.

(Also, she talks about how Jackson 'evinced a personal horror of lesbianism' but ... where's the citation? This doesn't come up again in-text until four hundred pages later in the biography, when Jackson is stressing about the first draft of Castle and whether she's accidentally writing the sisters as gay -- do they hide because they are somehow unnatural? am i never to be sure of any of my characters? if the alliance between [merricat] and constance is unholy then my book is unholy and i am writing something terrible, in my own terms, because my own identity is gone and the word is only something that means something else -- and again! it seems! that there is something significantly more complicated going on there than 'yikes, lesbians!' Also it seems hypothetically relevant that this was all being discussed in the correspondence with the housewife who eventually dropped her for Reasons Unknown! ANYWAY!)

...all that said, I appreciate Franklin for including these extensive quotes in the book to give me something to fight with her about; good scholarship even if I'm dubious about the analysis!

I also appreciate her description of Shirley Jackson's unfinished children's book: a portal fantasy about two kids who reluctantly go to the birthday party of a girl they don't much like, only to find out that she is a.) a portal fantasy princess and b.) now they have to go on a fantasy adventure to rescue her from peril. I'm so sad she never finished it, I would really love to read Shirley Jackson's Twelve Kingdoms.

C.L.R. James' The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution is well worth reading for a multitude of reasons, but I have to give a shout out above all things to the amazing bibliography. A representative quote, on R. Coupland's Wilberforce (London 1923) and The British Anti-Slavery Movement (London 1933): Both these books are typical for, among other vices, their smug sentimentality, characteristic of the final approach of Oxford scholarship to abolition. As the official view, they can be recommended for their thorough misunderstanding of the question. AND NOT A SINGLE PUNCH WAS PULLED THAT DAY. I took some pictures of other choice quotes and every time I look through them it fills me with joy to the bottom of my heart.

ANYWAY. The history of the Haitian revolution is incredibly fascinating on its own merits - I did know that was the only successful slave revolt of its era, but I didn't really have a great sense of the complex relationship between Haiti (or San Domingue, as it was then called) and France in that ten-year period between the French Revolution and the ascent of Napoleon, when slavery was all-too-briefly abolished and the question of independence vs faithful adherence to a then-revolutionary motherland still very much up in the air. The difficulty in trying to make political decisions based on the vacillations of an ongoing revolution taking place across an entire ocean, when any choice you make might already have been invalidated by something that happened three weeks ago that you have no way to know about -- I can't even imagine, and James does an extremely good job of conveying the sheer chaos of events, and the incredible achievement that the revolution was in spite of all attendant tragedies.

(James overall reads to me as both a generous and fair-minded writer; although Toussaint L'Ouverture is the central and most heroic figure of his narrative, he's careful to point out his mistakes, and equally careful to consider the merits of his enemies. For example, on Andre Rigaud, a rival of Toussaint's who overall sided with the white French: The waste, the waste of all this bravery, devotion and noble feeling on the corrupt and rapacious bourgeois who were still, in the eyes of the misguided Rigaud, the banner-bearers of liberty and equality.)

But James' text is also fascinating on a second level,having been written in a specific time with a specific project in mind. The book was first published in 1938, as the world teetered on the verge of World War II; the edition I read was published in 1963, and included an appendix on the Cuban Revolution. James' project is very explicitly radical, his primary intended audience those who are working towards the the decolonization of Africa and the West Indies, and as a result nearly every page forces you to think about history not as a series of disconnected events but as a long continuity of circumstances and collisions that have all impacted each other to create the world we live in today. As the first book I read this year, I suspect it's going to resonate through the rest of it.

In other news, now that shati and I have both read this book, we are desperate to find a copy of the 2012 French bioic starring Jimmy Jean-Louis, as yet unreleased in the US and available for purchase only for the princely sum of $99.99, so if anybody happens to have a lead on where to acquire it please do let us know!