Of Cats and Men by Sam Kalda (forthcoming 2017) - beautifully illustrated

"For centuries, legions of forward-thinking men—artists, writers, scientists, and philosophers—have shared their libraries and studios with a purring feline or two. In recent years, a new population of proud, cat-loving men has come out of the proverbial “cat closet,” embracing the purr, mew, and squint of feline companionship." Sam Kalda

    

Of Cats and Men by Sam Kalda will delight cat lovers.  Cats have always been an important part of my life. Kalda's book is centered on short articles on famous men from history that loved cats. Kalda is a professional illustrator and included  are lots of great drawings of well known men and their cats. 

In America presidents demonstrate their masculinity by posing with the familly dog. Crazy cats ladies are stereotyped figures, not crazy cat men.  One of Kalda's objectives is to debunk the notion that "real men don't love cats".  

Starting with an account of the role of cats in Ancient Egypt, he presents numerous short articles on famous men and their cats.  Many of the figures are musicians and great writers.  Amomg the writers covered are Mark Twain and Samuel Johnson (I am an avid student of Samuel Johnson and Kalda's chapter on Samuel Johnson is really well done.)

"As is fitting for a person of such accomplishment and intelligence, Johnson was a feline enthusiast. In his massively influential biography of Johnson, James Boswell makes special mention of one cat in particular that monopolized Johnson’s affections. Hodge, as the cat was called, received gushing treatment by Johnson. Indeed, as Johnson’s neighbor commented in his memoirs, he had “frequently seen the ruggedness of Dr. Johnson softened to smiles, and caresses; by the inarticulate, yet pathetic expressions of his favourite Hodge.” Boswell also mentions Johnson venturing out on his own to buy oysters for Hodge, “lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.”

Cats help to humanize exalted figures.  To me Siamese Cats are the best.  Kalda's drawing of the great composer Maurice Ravel especially delighted me.  The cats reminded me of my very much missed Yoda and Mr. C. 

Cats, not dogs, have been historically seen as the companions of Wizards. The scientific genius Nikola Telsa comes very close to a wizard.  A cat played a big part in his discoveries about electricity.  

I think all cat lovers will totally enjoy Of Cats and Men by Sam Kalda.

Photo by Daniel Seung Lee 

I'm an illustrator and cat fancier based in Brooklyn, New York.  I was born and raised in South Dakota—which sounds much more exotic than it actually is. I received my BFA in Painting at SUNY Purchase College, studied at the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art, and received my MFA at The Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

I work at The Bakery in South Williamsburg, Brooklyn and teach at Queens College.

From http://www.samkalda.com/

Mel u

Thomas Nast Political Cartoonist by Lynda Pflueger (2014) -

1840 to 1902, born in Germany, immigrated to America, staying In New York City, with his parents, Thomas Nast is considerd the father of American political cartooning. 

"Nast’s legacy to future generations includes the symbols he made popular that are still recognized today: Uncle Sam, the Democratic donkey, the Republican elephant, and Santa Claus. When Santa Claus appears each year, American children would label him an imposter if he did not look like the Santa Claus portrayed in Nast’s Christmas drawings." - Lynda Pflueger 

Before I read Thomas Nast Political Cartoonist by Lynda Pflueger at the very most I would perhaps recognized him as the creator of the post famous political cartoon in American history.

        "Boss Tweed", de facto ruler of New York City, and his cronies, trying to pass the blame (1871, first appeared in Harper's Weekly)

Pflueger starts her very well written biography with an account of the arrival of the Nast family in New York City. Nast was six at the time.  Pflueger tells us about the times of the family getting settled in a new country.  Nast attended public school from six to fourteen, he never did very well in school, being mainly interested in pursuing a career as an artist.  

    Self portrait of Nash during a rough patch in his life. Right after the civil war. 

In 1854 he left public school and began two years of art instruction.  He got a job as a draftsman in 1856 and sold his first drawing to Harper's Weekly in 1859.  He, as Pflueger details,was  to have a long and mutually benifical relationship with the four Harper brothers.  He began to regularly publish drawings in Harper's Weekly, many of them harshly critical of the very corrupt New York City political organization known as Tammany Hall, dominated by William "Boss" Tweed.  I as fascinated to read about his time as a war correspondent in Italy.  In a time where photography was just starting, and lots of potential voters are either barely literate or speak a language besides English, detailed vivid drawings like those of Nast were the viral media of the 1870s.

At the time venal politicians were exploting anti-immigrant sentiment among segments of the American population, sounds a bit familiar.  The biggest fear seems to have been that of Chinese railroad laborers who stsyed in the country after the railroads were completed.    Nast, an immigrant, was strongly pro immigrant. I loved Nast's cartoon making fun of politicians who proposed building a wall to keep out immigrants. 

As Nast's cartoons began to increase demands for reform in NYC he was offered large bribes to stop publishing his drawings.  To his great credit he refused.  Nast was pro-Catholic and anti-slavry.  He might have been predjudiced against the Irish.  Where your ancestors were from was a very big matter in NYC at the time.

Pflueger does a very good job explaining how politics worked at the time.  I also learned a lot about the  magazine business and the economics of being a cartoonist. Sometimes Nast was very affluent, sometimes he had to scramble to feed his wife and five kids.    Nast published drawings not just on political   corruption but on slavery and injustice of different sorts.  Nast comes across to me as a very good man, proud of his work but able to look at himself with a wry eye. 

            One of his more famous drawings.

One of his covers for Harper's Weekly

Nast was a character artist, he exaggerates characteristics to make his points, he relied on stereotyped features to make his drawings vivid.

   He wanted the South totally defeated

       

   

Thomas Nash Political Cartoonist, a young adult biography, taught me a lot about American history.  I never knew how important cartoons were. 

Readable in under two hours, I really enjoyed this book and recommend it to readers at all levels interested in American history.  The concerns of Nast are the concerns of America today.  I would love to see his cartoons on Trump and his wall! 

If I had a wish for the book,i would like to see included a chart converting USA money in the time of Nast's life to current money.  When Pflueger tells us, for example, that Nash was paid forty dollars a week when he started at Harper's I need a frame of reference for this.

http://www.lyndapflueger.com/ 

On the author's very well done webpage you can learn about how she came to write this book and her other works and interests. 

Mel u

Tracks-A Woman's Solo Trek Across 1700 Miles of Australian Outback by Robin Davidson 1995

Tracks is a cult classic, recently republished, about a woman's solo walk across 1700 miles of the Australian outback.  I learned a great deal about camels, Alice Springs Australia, the mentality of Australian men, Aborigines, and Robyn Davidson from this book.  It is a book about life on the frontier, self reliance, being a woman in an ultra-macho culture, about tourism in the outback and the savage mistreatment of native peoples of the outback.  One of the most interesting and to me edifying aspects of the book was in Davidson's accounts of the treatment of Aborigines   and her encounters with them.  She struggled hard to see the other in people very different from her.  One side of prejudice is ignorant hatred that sees the Aborigines as near sub-human completely without redeeming qualities existing only to be exploited and treated as vermin.   On the other side there are the well meaning who try to help them and to see into their culture.  The first mistake is to seem them as "all alike" when they are from many tribal groups, sometimes opposed to each other.  Many tribes have been forced onto lands with groups to which they have long histories of conflict.  

Camels were first introduced into the Australian outback early in the 19th century.  Many escaped captivity and they thrived and greatly multiplied in the outback, an ideal setting for them.  I admit I never until I read tracks saw Camels as having much personality but Davidson taught me a lot about camels. They are hard to manage, very bonded to their herd, and each has their own personality.  

As Tracks unfolds we see a spiritual journey unfold as Davidson tries to learn the skills needed to trek the outback with Camels.  Her preparations take up the first third of the book and were fascinating.  We meet a lot of interesting people in Alice Springs (Alice Springs is a very touristy town where people go to experience the outback.  

All in all a fascinating journey and an excellent book.  There is a new postscript in the  Bloomsbury edition.  I highly recommend this book.  

Author Data

Robyn Davidson is an award-winning writer who has travelled and published widely. Her books include Tracks, Desert Places,Quarterly Essay 24: No Fixed Address - Nomads and the Future of the Planet and, as editor, The Picador Book of Journeys andThe Best Australian Essays 2009. Her essays have appeared in Granta,, the Monthly, the Bulletin and Griffith Review, amongst others.   I hope to read more of her work.

  

Occasions of Sin: Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter (2010, 640 pages)

March 1 to April 21

It is not to late to participate in Irish Short Story Week Year III.  

If you are interested, please contact me.

Occasions of Sin:  Sex and Society in Modern Ireland by Diarmaid Ferriter covers the years from 1845 to 2005.  The image of sex in Ireland that emerges in this book is that of a very rigid, very conservative society dominated by centuries of repression.   In the short stories I have read one clearly gets a view of a society in

which there seems to be little sex without guilt, up until perhaps twenty years ago.   Much of the data in this book comes from court records and institutional documents.  The rate of illegitimate births in Ireland for much of this period was way lower than the rest of Europe and the United States but the clerics carried on as if the few such births were evidence that Ireland was place of great sin.  For a woman to have a child out of wedlock brought tremendous shame on her whole family.  Infanticide was very common as of course abortion is still illegal in Ireland.  

Ferriter says nothing in this book he does not back up with copious references.   He shows through court records that raping a 13 year old girl was likely to get you a shorter prison term than a consenting homosexual act between men.  Oddly there seem to be no cases of arrests for women in same sex relationships.  I suspect the answer of the clerics and school masters of much of the period would be that there were no lesbians in Ireland until 1990 or so.  The Ireland depicted in much of this period is one in which a book like The Joy of Sex would be considered not only obscene and get the seller arrested but would be about something that just was not seen as existing.  Even in marriage sex was seen as almost a sin, a quick relief for the man and a duty for the wife.  Prostitution was a huge factor in Irish society, especially in Dublin for much of the period of this book.  Partially driven by poverty and the insistence that women be virgins until married there was a huge market for the services of prostitutes.  House maids were also very vulnerable to molestation by their masters and if caught or if they get pregnant, they would be turned out to streets and labeled as whores.  The author says outsiders considered that the Irish were the least sexual people on earth for much of this period.  No one received any sexual education.  Girls were rarely advised about the meaning of their first periods and when it came it was seen as very shameful and the girls were made to feel unclean.  Boys in school were subject to sadistic teachers, some clerics some not, who beat them.  

People married latter in Ireland than elsewhere in Europe.  This was in part a legacy of the famine with much of the younger population leaving the country.  The rate of never married, never had any sort of sex persons in Ireland was, per the author, much higher in Ireland than elsewhere.  The Irish short stories I have read are full of old bachelors living at home waiting to inherit and spinster aunts living with their brothers.  There is very little of what one might call recreational sex in the short stories I have read.  Any sex act carries with it a huge load of guilt, the woman yields either because she is paid, it is her duty, or she hope to ensnare a man into marriage.  In any case it is over fast.  Most sexual encounters found at least one of the parties drinking as a prelude.

In 1970 with the wide spread of TV in Ireland, things begin to lighten up.  We still have a country where much of the population is sexual reticent, if Ferriter is right.  As Ireland began to become very prosperous, many eastern Europeans with freer ways began to help change the mores of Dublin.  

There is a rude saying that were it not for Guinness or Jameson the birth rate in Ireland would be zero.   I know this is a joke but Ferriter makes me understand it was probably not a lot of fun to be Irish if you were gay, an unwed mother, someone who just liked sex with multiple partners, or an unmarried woman much over twenty five.  Ferriter tells us that for much of the period, a sexually active single woman with more than one partner might find herself placed in a mental hospital and he also tells us this never happened to men.   

This is very related to the matters of the weak or missing Irish father I have spoken about quite a bit as one of the central themes of the Irish short story.  Declan Kiberd says this is in large part a legacy of colonialism and arises from the domination of the clerics over daily life in Ireland.

Occasion of Sin:   Sex and Society in Modern Ireland is an exhaustive (and at times exhausting) work.  It focuses very largely on court cases and government records.  There is very little speculation in this book, what the author says, he backs up in the 200 pages of notes.  

I am very glad I read this book. It is anything but a light read, it is a serious work of history.  It is a picture of a very repressed society.  Frank O'Connor said, I think anyway, that many people left Ireland just because they were so bored of living in the priest dominated society and I can see the truth of that in this book.  The book is considered definitive by historians.  Ferriter is  Professor  of Modern Irish History at the University College Dublin.

Official UCD Biography

Graduate of UCD, BA (1991), PhD (1996). Lecturer in Modern Irish History at UCD 1996-1998. Researcher  and writer with Dictionary of Irish Biography 1998-1999. Senior lecturer in Irish History at St Patrick's College, DCU, 1999-2008. Appointed Professor of Modern Irish History at  UCD in 2008. Visiting Burns Library Scholar at Boston College 2008-2009.  Main research interests: the social, political and cultural history of twentieth century Ireland. I hope to read his book on modern Irish history, The Transformation of Ireland soon. Mel u

Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland by W. J. McCormack (1991, 329 pages)

March 1 to April 14

Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland by W. J. McCormack is not just a superb biography of one of the most influential Gothic and Horror writers of all time (1814 to 1873) but a very detailed highly informative account of the social world of Victorian Ireland.  It goes very deeply into explaining the business side of Le Fanu's work, how he made money from his writings, how his life was influenced by his family (his great uncle was the dramatist Richard Sheridan), especially by the job of his father as a Protestant cleric at the time of rising rebellion against policies like the ones that required Catholics to donate ten percent of their income to Protestant churches.  

The le Fanu family was in an unusual position in that they were Catholics but they were not Anglo-Irish but descended from French Huguenots.  This meant they were not fully accepted by the ruling protestants classes of the time while not being a part of the Catholic majority.  It was almost as if le Fanu grew up in the worst of both worlds, disliked by many as a Protestant but not accepted as an equal by the Anglo-Irish.  McCormack goes into a lot of detail explaining how these sort of feelings manifested themselves in his work.  He also explains the dynamics of the family he grew up in, his marriage to the daughter of a prominent publisher, his business dealings with the journals of the times, and the impact that the mental breakdown of his wife had upon him.  

We do not quite know what happened to his wife.   In many of the stories and novels we see a deep feeling of horror about impending sexual relations or see them as destructive of one's psyche.  We see this clearly in the character of Carmilla, the first lesbian vampire.  There are numerous malignant female characters in the stories of le Fanu.

McCormick acknowledges it, and I have even seen it in some readings I have done for ISSM3, that much of le Fanu's output is not especially good.  His output was huge.  There are e-book editions of his works you can buy at a very fair prize that come to over 5000 pages.  McCormack says his best, and maybe only worth reading novel is Uncle Silas and he devotes a lot of time to relating this work to what we know of the life of le Fanu.

This is very detailed book.  McCormack does not say anything he is not prepared to back up in detail.  He does indulge in pschological speculation about why le Fanu makes use of the certain recurring themes over and over.  He admits we cannot be sure what was in the mind of le Fanu but it all seemed quite plausible.

This books lets us see how he lived, what it felt like to be the child of a rector from a famous writing family, to go through periods of prosperity and hard times.  It lets us see how the mental illness of his wife impacted his work.  (There are a lot of scary women ghosts and evil faeries and such in his work.)  I see this book as essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in 19th century Irish literature. 

This work is published by Lilliput Press.  Lilliput press is the premier publisher of quality books about Ireland and Irish literary writers.

Mel u

Mentioning the War: Essays & Reviews 1999-2011 by Kevin Higgins

Mentioning the War:  Essays & Reviews 1999-2011 by Kevin Higgins (2012, 219 pages)

Mentioning the War:  Essays & Reviews 1999-2011 by Kevin Higgins is a nice collections of book reviews, focusing largely on contemporary Irish poetry, general cultural commentaries on the state of the arts in Ireland in post Celtic Tiger bad times and some brilliant political analysis.   Higgins' political thoughts range from very Irish centered issues to global concerns.    (There will be a more detailed author bio at the end of the post.)   He talks a good bit about the work in Iraq, which I do see as a terrible thing, both morally and as a use of American resources.  It will be remembered as one of the dumbest wars initiated by the United States.

When first presented with the opportunity to post on his collection I of course said I would be interested in reading it and would then decide if it could post on the work.   Initially  I was confused as to how I might approach the book.   Much, at least half, of the work is taken up with reviews of the work of contemporary Irish poets and Irish political infighting, both things very remote to me.   Then I read his two very insightful articles on George Orwell, a writer whose works I admire tremendously, and I knew I could find a way to talk about his collection.   I have loved the work of Orwell ever since I read Animal Farm in the 8th grade.  In high school I had a teacher, who claimed to be a socialist, who said the book was just a crude attack on communism and of no greater value than as a historical curiosity.

I thought to myself, OK you know nothing about contemporary Irish poetry and next to nothing about Irish politics but the man admires Orwell and a lot of the essays on literary works also contain very thought provoking remarks about the role of the arts in modern society so I decided perhaps I could post on this book.   Some of the essays are polemical pieces and just as Samuel Johnson spoke for victory you can feel that Higgins once and a while writes for victory and knows how to persuade others to his point of view.   He also talks a lot about the role of the poet in society, a topic of interest to me.   By and large I have not  read much poetry by living writers.  The only poets I have read intensely are Yeats and Whitman.

This will be a kind of rambling post in which I talk about a number of his essays.   I do not agree with some of the things he says and I will try to explain this but my real purpose of writing on Mentioning the War:  Essays & Reviews 1999-2011 by Kevin Higgins is let others know of the existence of a very honestly written work that has a lot to teach the world about poetry, politics and Ireland.   He seeks justice and he tries to tell the truth, just like Orwell did.

As to my own political orientation (I only mention it because I think it colors ones thinking in posting on a work like Mentioning the War:  Essays & Reviews 1999-2011 by Kevin Higgins) is vaguely left wing with some libertarian ideas but I distrust all grand ideologies.    My blog is very multi-cultural and I see the harm in the domination of world politics by America, especially in the Bush eras, but  I am not knee-jerk Anti-American.

The book starts with a forward by Darrell Kavanagh in which he tells us, and I could for sure see this, that one of the very interesting things this book provides us a look at the author's at one time very far left politics where  ideology comes first evolving to a more pragmatic approach.  I loved these  lines from Kavanagh and I totally agree with it.   "Mentioning the War is an antidote to the know-nothing, don-t want to know anything attitude which perverts human society.   You know the sort of thing:   super confident twenty-somethings, working in marketing or some other non-job, without an ounce of culture or humanity, blathering about how they are their own 'brand'".  In the introduction John Goody helps us understand some of the things that have influenced Higgins and talks about his development as a poet and political thinker and teacher.

I will talk about a number of the essays and reviews one at a time, in a fashion similar to my manner of posting on short story collections.  (I do not consider myself a "book reviewer", I just read things and post my reaction to them.)

"Back Home to Ireland"

The lead off piece in the book, "Back Home to Ireland" in a way kind of sets the tone for the book.  It starts out when Kevin was seven and his family is moving back to Ireland from Coventry in the west midlands of England.   He moves back to Ireland in a period of upheaval.   There are power cuts due to coal miner strikes, the IRA has begun a bombing campaign in London.   Somehow when he left England Kevin knew he was going into a less comfortable world.   I admit I liked it when he tells us he got the day off from school for the funeral of De Valera and his mother said "it was nice to see him going to his own funeral for a change".


"And no one knew its name"

The second essay helped me feel a very common sense of humanity with Kevin.   It is very personal story in which you can feel his love for his mother and his immense pain at her illness.  I think putting it very near the start of the collection was very brilliant editorially as it makes us see Kevin is not just a very intellectual, cultured immensely knowledgeable person but someone any one can relate to.  The story starts in 1977 (Kevin was born in 1967) when Kevin's mother cannot go into town to watch the St. Patrick's Day  parade because of a pain in her back.  Of course children of ten think their parents are indestructible and Kevin does not worry on it much.   We learn about Kevin's family.   We go on an expedition with them.   His mother's back pain gets worse and worse and the doctors can find nothing wrong with her.  The vague suggestion is the problems are in her mind and one doctor hints at a faith healer.  Kevin gets into football and becomes a Liverpool fan!   Kevin talks about the politics of the time, through the prism of his memories.   His mother is still sick and no doctor can explain why.  They call her illness "psychosomatic".   My own mother went through an extended period of illness at the end of her life and I trembled at the thought of any doctor try to tell her that her problems were "psychosomatic" and I sense the same feeling in Kevin essay.  "An no one knew its name" reads like the best of short stories so I will leave the ending untold.  It did help me locate Kevin in "human space" and it is perfectly executed.

"Socialist Classics:  George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia"

This was the first essay I read in the collection.  My thinking was OK I know nothing of the poets he speaks of but I have been reading Orwell on and off for several decades so I will make this essay the determining factor in deciding if I will post or even read his whole collection.   The essay starts out with an account of a conversation Kevin had with an "elderly Englishman" he met in Athens at a poetry conference.   The man tells him he does not "get the whole Orwell thing".   He says Orwell did a bit of the bohemian (Down and Out in Paris and London comes to mind-a book which may incidentally kill any interest you have in fancy restaurants) thing, then dabbled in politics and then "reverted to type".  He "does not see what all the fuss is about".  The problem turned out to be Orwell attitude toward the communist party.  I do not want to spend the time to talk a lot about the history of the development of Orwell's political thought but he was at one time a member of the communist party but he turned against and it was in Homage to Catalonia, his account of the war in Spain, that signals his break with the party.  Orwell was to big for any party, too honest, too concerned with suffering over ideology and repudiated the cult of personality as seen around Stalin.

Let us look for a moment at this key remark by Kevin.  "In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell whose Animal Farm was later co-opted by the CIA, writes from a position that is decisively to the left not only of the Labor Party but also of the Communist Party"   Kevin tells us that Orwell was for the revolution to a far greater extent than "all Stalinism's literary fellow travellers ever were".  The CIA did pay for a cartoon version of the book to be used as a propaganda tool (The Manchester Guardian has a very interesting article on how this happened) but this really is a kind of cosmic joke because it if lead anyone to actually read the book they would never accept any form of totalitarianism again.   It is no more necessary to understand Russian politics of the 1930s and 40s to understand Animal Farm a knowledge of English politics of the early 18th century is required to appreciate Gulliver's Travels.  To my mind such an approach to both of the books trivializes them.

"Culture and the recession"

"Whoever you are the age of less is upon you".

How can you not respect the truth of this, the global truth.  The time is past due for first world countries to take a hugely disproportionate share of the world's wealth, the time has come for a CEO to know longer make 1000 or more times as much as a worker.  Less does not mean misery,  unless you impose this on yourself or let advertisers do it to you.

Here is one of the most important sentences for an outsider to Ireland to understand:

"Since the implosion of the international banking system in September 2008 ushered in this era of great economic unhappiness, the atmosphere of everyday life in Ireland has changed for everybody to an extent that would be unimaginable just three years ago".

To a large extent, the ordinary people of Ireland (and Europe and the USA and many other places) are being asked to pay for the mistakes of the rich.  Politicians say hardships must be shared, the hardships for those who caused the banking crisis in Ireland include smaller yachts and a cut back in the staff at your Greek Island villa, for others it means taking your meds only every other day.  Kevin talks about things related to this throughout his collection, especially in this essay.   Ireland has been, compared to say the Philippines where there is close to no public support for literary arts, blessed with good government support of the arts.  I am totally in awe, as is the world, of the literary output of the Irish.  Galway, a city of about 75,000 has produced more great writers than many a city of five million.  Kevin talks about how the economic crisis in Ireland has effected the verbal arts and I found his essay very edifying.

"From Tyburn to a Tin Box-Cromwell's Head by Jonathan Fitzgibbons"

I liked the starting lines of this essay in which the popularity of the American president George W. Bush was found to better than that of Oliver Cromwell.  I have learned of late that the Irish hatred for Cromwell derives from his terrible genocide war in which about 41 percent of the population was died and in which over 50,000 people, mostly from the west of Ireland, were sent as slaves to the Caribbean.   This article is a review of a book about the post death head of Oliver Cromwell from its detachement from his body in Tyburn to its eventual reburial in a tin box.  The descriptions quoted of the executions make it sound like a very surreal event in that Cromwell had been dead for two years when they cut off his head.   There is a very interesting historical irony pointed out at the end of the essay.   Cromwell was not in his a left-wing anti-authority figure despised by right wing monarchists and Torries.  Given this, "the worst atrocities of Irish history were committed by a man who was, as the Marxist would say, a progressive rather than a reactionary."

"Taking Arms Against A Sea of Troubles-Neoconservatism:Why We Need It by Douglas Murray

This is a brilliant essay in which Higgins shows us his thinking has developed and how he lets facts dictates what he believes, not the other way around.  By this I means he lets events speak for themselves.   The essay centers around America's intervention in Serbia.   There is much concern in Ireland, as most of my readers will not know ( I do not think I did) because the Irish government has allowed USA military planes to refuel at Shannon Airport on the west coast of Ireland, thus aiding the American war efforts in Iraq and Serbia.  There is the wisdom of centuries in these lines  "I had known about the deadly Stalinist combination of lies and mass murder since I was a fifteen year old recruit to Trostkysim...I thought Left wing apologia for mass murder was something from terrible times past.  I now began to ask myself whether there is something inherent in Left Wing thinking which, where it holds sway, makes lies and mass murder likely if not inevitable."   If you think Higgins is just another left wing ideologist you are dead wrong.

"Poetry, Politics and Dorothy Gone Terribly Astray"

"Almost every poet I know is prone to exaggerate the influence poetry can have on world events".

Poets are caught between their passions about their work and their feeling they may be of no consequence in the real world, what ever that is.  As Higgins says, some react to this feeling by screaming their barbaric yep on the roof tops of the world (sorry I cannot always help myself) others by withdrawing into their studies or the world of academia and poetry societies.   As Higgins says, politicians do not lose a lot of sleep worrying about the opinions of poets they have never heard of anyway.   But this does not mean poetry has no consequence we just cannot say in advance what they will be.   Poets and short story writers helped create all of the great religions of the world but when they were doing this 1000s of years ago they had no vision of this.  Ok I love these lines -  "The world, from New York to Madrid to Bali, is wracked by a conflict between a Texan buffoon..and a batty Saudi aristocrat out to restore the seventh-century Islamic Caliphate.."

There are a total of forty-seven essays and reviews in Mentioning the War:  Essays & Reviews 1999-2011 by Kevin Higgins.  I read them all, even the ones about poets I never heard of and have no way of reading.
Higgins is a very close reader and quotes enough to give you a good feeling for the writers of which he speaks.   I enjoyed seeing that he was willing to learn from facts and did not just see anyone who opposed American policy has automatically a hero on that basis.  His work is informed deeply by reading Orwell when young and as his life progressed reading him again and again.  Orwell was not a saint, as Higgins points out in an essay, but he tries hard to tell the truth and he puts people before policy and sees the petty vanity in many political causes, from any spectrum of opinion.

Author Data  (from the webpage of his publisher Salmon Poetry)

Author Biography

Kevin Higgins facilitates poetry workshops at Galway Arts Centre; teaches creative writing at Galway Technical Institute and on the Brothers of Charity Away With Words programme. He is also Writer-in-Residence at Merlin Park Hospital and the poetry critic of the Galway Advertiser. He was a founding co-editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine. His first collection of poems The Boy With No Face was published by Salmon in February 2005 and was short-listed for the 2006 Strong Award. His second collection, Time Gentlemen, Please, was published in March 2008 by Salmon. One of the poems from Time Gentlemen, Please, ‘My Militant Tendency’, featured in the Forward Book of Poetry 2009.  His work also features in the anthology Identity Parade – New British and Irish Poets(Ed Roddy Lumsden, Bloodaxe, 2010). Frightening New Furniture is his third collection of poems and was published in 2010 by Salmon Poetry. Kevin has read his work at most of the major literary festivals in Ireland and at Arts Council and Culture Ireland supported poetry events in Kansas City, USA (2006), Los Angeles, USA (2007), London, UK (2007), New York, USA (2008), Athens, Greece (2008); St. Louis, USA (2008), Chicago, USA (2009), Denver, USA (2010), Washington D.C (2011), Huntington, West Virginia, USA (2011), Geelong, Australia (2011) & Canberra, Australia (2011). As part of his Culture Ireland supported trip to Chicago in February 2009 he participated in and took first place in a specially arranged poetry slam at the Chicago’s Green Mill Bar and Lounge, the birthplace of slam poetry. Kevin’s fourth collection of poetry, The Ghost In The Lobby, will be published by Salmon Poetry in 2013. Kevin is co-organiser of Over The Edge literary events. 

You can read selections form this book here

You can learn more about Kevin's work on his very well done blog.

I strongly endorse this book for anyone who wants a serious introduction to the world of Modern Irish Poetry, and its interaction with politics, locally and globally.    This a very well written, at times quite funny and consistently interesting book.  

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov  ( forthcoming March 5, 2013)

The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov is a very interesting biography of Frederick Bruce Thomas (1872 to 1928) who went from being the son of slaves in Mississippi to being the owner of the most famous and highest regarded restaurant, with a clientele that included the cream of Russian nobility, in Moscow.   When the Russian revolution forced him to flee the country to Istanbul, starting all over with almost nothing he started what became the most fashionable restaurant in that city.   In Moscow a restaurant had to offer much more than good food to attract top crowds.   They had to be also theaters with stages shows interesting enough to attract people away from their competitors.    Restaurants also had private rooms where assignations often took place and many of the actresses in the theatrical professions were in the demimonde mode.

There is a tremedous amount to be learned from this wonderful book.   Thomas left Mississippi barely out of his teens.   His family was so hard working and intelligent that they managed to go from sharecroppers, after being freed from slavery, to owners of a very large landholding.   They lost it all in a terrible swindle.   Thomas went first to Chicago where he got a job as a waiter at a very fancy place.   His manners were ingratiating, for better or worse he knew what the clientele wanted and he presented the image of the smiling black servant to perfection.  He began to earn relatively large sums of money.   Thomas had a restless spirit and he moved from Chicago to New York City where he also worked as a waiter.   From there, more or less just to do it, he moved to Paris where he taught himself French and once again began to work as a waiter at a very high tone establishment.  In Paris he felt almost none of the racial disdain he had learned to live with in America.   He found himself earning very large tips.  From Paris he moved to Moscow (there is so much in this book some details will have to be left out) where he learned Russian, married a German woman, became a Russian citizen and started the most famous restaurant in all of Russia.  Imagine a place out of the Greta Garbo movie of Anna Karenina with Grand Dukes dining with their opera singer mistresses and Rasputin entertaining in a private room while tables order multiple bottles of champagne with a cost of ten years earnings for one of their peasants and you get the idea.  Thomas began to make huge sums of money, millions of dollars a year. He petitioned for and was given Russian citizenship for himself and his family.  Thomas, as portrayed, was a master at seeing what rich people wanted and giving it to them. He was also a very shrewd business man, had a great sense of theater and treated his employees well.   He felt little prejudice in Moscow.  The author does a wonderful job of letting us see what life was like in Russian in the first 15 or so years of the last century.   When the revolution occurred  Thomas was very much on the wrong side of history, marked out by his own high level of wealth and his total identification with the elite of the old regime.   I really enjoyed seeing how Moscow might have been perceived by Thomas.  One can only imagine the cultural differences between the backwoods of Mississippi to that of ultra-cosmopolitan multi-cultural Moscow.   From Moscow he flees to Odessa but that is only a short stop as the revolution spreads.

In a graphically described horrible passage he and his family end up in Istanbul where, in partnership with a very famous bar owner, he starts another restaurant and from nothing he built the most famous restaurant in the city.

This is a richly detailed biography with enough historical background to allow is to understand the milieu in which Thomas lived without overwhelming us.   I have done a bit of reading about Russia in the early years of the 20th century and I learned a lot from this book.  Thomas felt little prejudice from Europeans in his travels but he did feel it from American consular officials when he tried to get an American passport.  At the time the law seemed to be that if one left the USA and seemed not to intend to return at a certain point in time, this was up to the discretion of state department officials, then you could be denied a passport to return to the USA.  

I was fascinated by the author's depiction of life in Istanbul.   His restaurant was known for having beautiful Russian waitresses  all of whom claimed to have been a countess, and some really were, in the old days.  It was the practice for many Russian expatriates to elevate themselves to the status of ex-nobility.  The restaurant somehow made me think of Rick's in Casablanca but it was more exciting and decadent.  We see him run afoul of Muslim laws and see how he dealt with his many problems.  

There is lots of drama in The Black Russian by Vladimir Alexandrov.   We meet a lot of fascinating people, some wonderful some terrible and most in between somewhere.  

The sad thing  Thomas probably would not have been allowed to develop these business in his home country in the period in which he lived.   He had to leave America to realize his dreams.  He was a very strong man, very intelligent.   Some now might fault him for "sucking up to the rich" but he had no real alternative if he wanted anything for himself and his family.

I really liked this book and think most people will be fascinated by it.  There is so much wonderful detail and many fascinating people.  The standard cliche on a life like this would be "stranger and more wonderful than any novel" but here it is true.  The author is a renowned scholar and it shows in the details of the book.  It was really interesting to learn how the restaurant/theater  business worked in Moscow.   If you are at all into early 20th century Russian history, one of my interests, then you need to read this book.

Author Data

I grew up in New York City in a Russian emigre family and wanted to be a scientist from an early age. However, after getting Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Geology from Queens College and The City College of New York, I decided that I'd learned enough about the natural world but didn't understand myself or other people. My solution was to switch to studying literature and the humanities, which resulted in my getting a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton. This helped, and the quest continues. After teaching in the Slavic Department at Harvard, I moved to Yale University in 1986, where I continue to teach courses on Russian literature and culture. I live in Hamden, Connecticut, with my wife, who teaches Spanish at Yale, and have a son who is in graduate school in Washington, D. C., and a daughter who finished college in 2011 and is working in NYC.  (from the webpage of author)

My thanks to the publisher Atlantic Monthly Press for providing me with an advance copy of this book.  

Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower

Embracing Defeat:  Japan in the Wake of World War II by John Dower  (2000, 680 pages, 5237 KB)

In order to understand the post WWII Japanese novel, one of my core interests, you have to understand the totally devastating effect defeat in WWII had on the psyche of the Japanese people.   Seconding to having been there and lived through it I can think of no better way to acquire this knowledge than by reading Embracing Defeat:  Japan in the Wake of World War II  by John Dower.   To try to convey the enormity of this consider that the Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, was not considered as God's representative on earth as some might view the Pope, he was seen in the belief structure of Japan as actually being define, being God.  Dower does a wonderful job of describing the reaction of the ordinary person to hearing the Emperor announce on the radio, in a high voice speaking Japanese as it was spoken hundreds of years ago (as if one spoke in Shakespearean English) that the war was over and Japan was surrendering.  Many people threw themselves on the ground in shock, some for shame and other for joy.

I really strongly urge anyone with more than a passing interest in Japanese literature to read this book.   One of the biggest sources of shame to the Japanese men was how the women of Japan prostituted themselves to Americans and how Japanese children quickly came to worship chocolate bearing GIs.    The millions of Japanese soldiers who came home after the war, often to find their families and homes gone, were treated with scorn and often hatred.  The average Japanese very quickly came to see the country as having been lead into a war they could never win by military leaders. The Japanese totally repudiated any sense of guilt for the war.  Dower talks about how MacArthur (who was in fact ruler of Japan from the end of the war up until 1952) wanted to keep Hirohito in power (lots of people, including America's allies, wanted him to be hung as a war criminal-it is clear he either knew of the atrocities or he was an idiot) so he could tell the Japanese people to follow the directives of the Americans.  Because of language barriers, Americans had to rely on Japanese to actually give the orders to the Japanese.

Dower talks about how the need to survive through illegal commerce in the black market greatly corrupted Japanese society, how the pervasive years of hunger left a heavy mark.   He talks about how the Americans did succeed in building a democratic society in Japan.   He lets us see how the Americans ran the country.  Needless to say, with a million plus mostly young service men just out of years of bloody war  now stationed in and ruling Japan, a huge sex industry sprang up to service their needs.   Japan also had to find a way to deal with the millions of returning soldiers.  There were also many foreign workers such as Koreans and Filipinos that the Japanese brought into work as slave laborers.

Dower does talk about whether it was actually necessary to drop the two atom bombs as many felt the Japanese were ready to surrender, partially in fear of a Russian invasion of millions, seeking revenge for the Russian-Japanese war.  Others think, and this was the idea put forth by the propaganda machinery, that each Japanese was ready, 100 Million of them, to die in defense of their country so dropping the bombs saved many more lives than it cost.  Personally I think dropping the bombs was the right thing to do.  The Japanese and Germans were also working on Nuclear weapons and would have carpet bombed their enemies with them if they could have.

Once the war was over, ordinary Japanese actually began to make jokes about the Emperor and some wanted the dynasty ended.  

As a personal note, of this 688 pages books, 300 pages are footnotes and references to texts that substantiate the author's points.  I am starting to see this as a wasteful practice for non-academic books.  I think money could be saved and paper also if instead of  including 300 pages of footnotes, authors put the notes online with a link in the book to the notes so those few people who desire to read 1000 footnotes can do so.

A History of the Irish Short Story by Heather Ingman

A History of the Irish Short Story by Heather Ingman  (2009, 336 pages, 1476 KB)

The Irish Quarter

A History of the Irish Short Story by Heather Ingman is a very well done work of literary history with a lot to teach readers like me without academic training in the history of Irish literature or the short story.  The best way to learn about the history of the Irish short story is to read a lot of them.  There are several good anthologies.  Once you have read a lot of Irish short stories then read a lot of America, Russian, French and English short stories. Once you have done this, go back and read some more.    When you are done with this I would say your first secondary work on the short story should be the brilliant but flawed The Lonely Voice:  A Study of the Short Story by Frank O'Connor.  

Ingman did a very good job of explaining how the Irish short story became such a dominating literary form.   She says, as does pretty much all who write on the short story, that Edgar Alan Poe was the first writer to produce self-consciously atristic short stories without a primary didactic purpose.  The first Irish short story writers, people like William Carleton and Maria Edgeworth were caught in a cultural and economic dilemma.  They were committed to the Irish but they were educated as if they were English and the audience for their stories was much greater in London than Dublin or Galway.  She also talks about writers like Edith Sommerville and  Violent Martin (AKA Ross Martin) who wrote stories which seem on first glance to be making fun of the Irish as buffoons who need an English magistrate to run their lives for them.  Ingman does a good job, and for what it is worth, I think she is right, of explaining  that there is a lot more depth in their stories than this.  She talks about William Carleton as a transition figure from works in the tradition of the story teller with a primarily moral purpose to George Moore whose The Untilled Field she tells us marks the start of the modern Irish short story.  

She talks about the role that magazines, which began in Ireland in the mid 1830s, had in the development of the Irish short story.  This parallels exactly the development of the Australian short story sixty years later.   William Trevor has said that the short story was a dominant literary form in Ireland because the Irish did not have a large enough body of people with the leisure time and the education to read long novels whereas the English did have these conditions which explains why the novel dominates in England and the short story in Ireland.  The exact same conditions prevailed in Australia up until after WWI and you see a similar domination of the literary world there by short stories published in two magazines.   

Ingman goes on to explain how The New Yorker's willingness to publish and pay top money for short stories came to shape the Irish short story in that writers wrote stories they thought the editors of the magazine would like.  It also imposed length requirements.  This same need to satisfy the requirements of magazine editors, especially those of The Hindu Times, shaped the modern Indian short story.   

Ingman covers all of the big name writers.   I think what I most found edifying in the book was the account of the transition from the 19th century short story to the modern era story.  What I liked best about the book was the many reading ideas I got from it.  I already have in mind an idea for a project for Irish Short Story Week Year 3 set to start March 1, 2013.  Elizabeth Bowen wrote seven stories set in Ireland and I think I will do a series of posts on them.   Ireland was neutral during WWII while Bowen was deeply committed to the English side and spent the war years in London.  Ingman spends a lot of time in the book dealing with the question of the Irish identity of Irish short story writers.

I think anyone with an interest and at least a starting level of erudition in the Irish short story will enjoy and profit from this collection.   I would classify it as sort of half way between a pure academic book and popular history.   If I lived in Dublin I would love to take a class or two from Professor Ingman.

Author Auto Biography 

Heather Ingman

Adjunct Professor, School of English, Trinity College

I originally taught in the French Department in Trinity College, Dublin before going to Hull University where I researched and taught twentieth-century women’s writing. Since returning to Ireland in 2000, my publications and teaching have been mostly in the area of Irish women’s writing. I am particularly interested in inter war women’s fiction, Irish women’s short stories, the theme of nation and gender in Irish women’s fiction, the mother-daughter relationship in twentieth-century women’s fiction, and in the theme of spirituality in women’s writing.

Research Interests

I participated in a five-year project supported by the British Academy, European Intertexts, studying women’s writing as part of a European fabric. I have published numerous articles on women’s writing in periodicals such asThe Year’s Work in English, Irish University Review and Irish Studies Review. I have reviewed for academic journals and regularly give conference papers on aspects of women’s writing. Authors covered include Virginia Woolf, Kate O’Brien, Edna O’Brien, Maeve Brennan, Elizabeth Bowen, Jennifer Johnston, Rose Macaulay and George Egerton. I have supervised Ph.Ds on women’s writing and been external examiner for Ph.Ds in Hull University and the University of Miami. I have been invited to give two plenary lectures on Irish women’s writing at international conferences in 2012.

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Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra

Portrait of a Novel:  Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra (2012, 416 Pages, 1180 KB)

I decided I wanted to read Portrait of a Novel:  Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece by Michael Gorra  when I saw that Colm Toibin, who wrote a greatly admired novel based on the London years of Henry James (1843 to 1916-USA), The Master, listed it as one of his top reads for 2012.   He said it was more than just a very close reading of Portrait of a Lady but also a great work of literary biography (one of my favorite genres) and a history of the literary culture of the era.

This is a great book.  Anyone interested in Henry James or American literature will really like this superbly written and documented book.   It is not just a work of literary exegesis, though it does a great job of explaining how the novel works, it is a travelogue of the places in the novel and of James' haunts in Europe.   We meet and learn some very interesting things about Turgenev, Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant and other writers and cultural figures that were new to me.   Gorra deals with the often asked question, never to be really answered, as to whether or not James was gay and if he was a life time celibate.  He explains how James came to be able to create such brilliant realized female characters.

This book is also a great and humbling lesson in how to read a masterpiece.  Gorra also talks about a number of James' other works, he especially admires The Aspern Papers, Washington Square and The Wings of the Dove.   I also was happy to learn of the short stories of James' that Gorra most admires.

Gorra also talks about the place of James in the canon  of the modern novel.  He goes into a lot of details about James' famous family and the economics of his publishing career.  He talks about how James was one of the very first modern writers to deal extensively with the contents of the consciousness of his characters.

Gorra does talk about some of the prior biographical works on James and about other interpreters of his work.  There are about seventy pages of footnotes and documentation.   Gorra does not say anything he cannot back up.

I totally endorse this book to anyone interested in the subject matter.   I do not see it finding many readers who are not already into Henry James but if you have never read James I think Gorra would tell you to start with Daisy Miller.  

I hope to read at least The Wings of the Dove and a number of the short stories,in 2013.  I also think I will reread Portrait of a Lady.  



Author Data

Michael Gorra came to Smith in 1985, after getting his A.B. at Amherst and his Ph.D. at Stanford. He works primarily with 19th and 20th century fiction, concentrating on the history and development of novelistic form. His upper-division courses include the Victorian Novel, Modern British Fiction, a class on contemporary fiction called The Novel Now, a 200-level class on William Faulkner, and seminars on George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the work of Henry James. In the Comparative Literature program he has taught classes on travel writing and the 19th century short story. He also teaches a first-year seminar on the 19th century European novel called Ambition and Adultery, and in Fall 2013 will offer a new first-year seminar called Reading the Civil War.


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