Charles Bronson got your tongue?

7:39pm: 1. Sarah Palin, the Lady Sybilla of politics, Y/Y?

2. On a walk through the wilds of the Riverwalk this noon, actually on (one of several) beaten path but not the paved one, I saw two different bunnies! One was an adult and the other about the size of my two fists together. They were ordinary brown, white-tailed bunnies, doing ordinary bunny things like running away from the big stompy human, but they deserve an exclamation point anyway.

3. Sean Casey has taken over as color commentator (at home games anyway) for the Red Sox, which is fitting, because he's been known for a while as The Mayor of Boston. Which, considering he spent most of his career in Cincinnati, is kind of a feat. I gather he is actually Mayor of any town he happens to be in (and sometimes Mayor of a park, a clubhouse, or a living room), which is to say he is an incurable chatty Cathy. Yes, he was a first-baseman, the ultimate chatty Cathy position, and retired this past off-season after playing in Boston, being about 6 months older than me. (Urk.) Anyway, he is an ideal candidate for color commentary, except for the fact that he sounds very hoarse at the moment.

He's blabby the same way Dennis Eckersley is blabby, in that way that sounds like it is filling silence rather than adding new material, but his flights of fancy are not nearly as flighty as Eck's. He'll learn, I suppose. I hope he takes elocution lessons too.

3A. I hope they're keeping Dave Roberts on as travel commentator. He is just so cute! Even when you can't see him you know he is just sitting there being cute! I mean, he is also not a moron, which is nice. There need to be more Dave Robertses in the world.

4. The nice thing about a tiny white overlord is that you can take it into the woods with you and type (no, there is no internet in the woods). Except now I have to figure out how to wash tiny globules of what I presume is pine sap off the screen. I mean, in addition to the fingerprints (many).

2:18pm: Seen in a comment thread near you
Why is John Boehner orange?

John Boehner is actually an oompa-loompa with gigantism.

12:12pm: Ah ha ha. I am watching The Long Good Friday (1979, rated X by the British High Muckety Board of Censors*), and it is a total British Isles Actor Bingo. I swear I just watched Dr. Belloq from Raiders of the Lost Ark try to pick up Pierce Brosnan in a swimming pool, only to be lured into the showers and stabbed to death by Sgt. Harper from the Sharpe movies.

And they're not even the main characters! Brosnan is credited as "1st Irishman"!

(* It's for violence, hand-to-hand mostly, and very intimate/not-cartoony. Whoa nelly.)

It's Bob Hoskins's breakthrough role, and a lot of London gangsters both high and low. As a plot goes it's not terribly strong, but Hoskins is charismatic as usual and Helen Mirren plays his counterpart with great force. It's striking to watch this, like archaeology for the slapdash versions done decades later by Guy Ritchie and his ilk. It's definitely not a funny romp, the first time around.

(rez_lo, you must see Mona Lisa (1985). Even if you can't sit through the whole plot -- which hinges on sexual exploitation -- you must watch the first 10 minutes, for a look at Hoskins falling wordlessly in love.)

10:02pm: Oh my total god, people, Michael Jackson is on every freaking channel on my television. He is guest-starring on Grey's Anatomy! Him and Barbara Walters! They are intrepid young doctors or something! Sheesh. I know he was famous and everything, but dude wasn't a president.

(I suppose it could be worse. He could be a Kennedy, and the news vans would be, like, in my back yard.)

8:44pm: O Pioneers
O Willa Cather, please learn how to subplot.

Okay, that's mean. It's a first novel, and it's clear that plot is not really the point. The point is the indomitable woman, the only one of her father's children with a head on her shoulders, who sticks it out and makes a prosperous farm and... manages not to become bitter at the stupid entitled assholes her brothers become. That's Alexandra's superpower, seriously: she can endure any stupid shit you throw at her, on up to murder. Cather at one point specifically says that she is not clever -- as if cleverness were a signal of a weaselly disposition, and stalwart Alexandra is anything but weaselly.

Because Alexandra loves the land, and we're treated now and then to loving descriptions of its difficulty, its oddity, how it giveth and taketh away, how all you can do is devote yourself to it and wait. It occurred to me afterward that Cather was writing explicitly for an audience who had never been there and would probably never go there, and didn't have movies to fill in that visual-spatial gap. She was also, of course, writing to an audience that had a strong emotional connection to the idea of a farm, to the idea of taking a grassy field and making it an investment, to "civilizing" the land while falling in love with it.

(You could write many essays about land and love and matrimonial metaphor in civilizing narratives; in this case, it's a lesbian metaphor. To wit:)

For me, the novel was about a crypto-lesbian making her way in a world much less amenable to independent women than this one (and so it was very satisfying to look up Willa Cather and discover people have been debating her sexuality for decades!). Unfortunately, this approach to the novel means that a 15-year gap in the narrative, as we skip ahead from lean years to fat ones, is a disastrous lacuna in an otherwise worthwhile portrait of labor and canny enterprise.

But Cather slips in a (het) romance for Alexandra, which fellow is kind and loves the land too, but is very badly integrated into the overall narrative. The novel needed 100 more pages of daily rural life and its petty joys and disappointments to distract me from the giant LOVE INTEREST tattoo on Carl's forehead. Really, the whole ending needed to be much more fleshed-out, much less skipped-over. On the other hand, reading Cather, I can feel that throughline to John Steinbeck and the cavalcade of "and then they had to shoot the dog" novels that so plagued my adolescent English classes.

9:58pm: So am I hard-hearted, or does Jules et Jim not actually make any sense? Or anyway, all the characters are blithering ninnies.

(I realized while watching it that I've never seen Oskar Werner act in his native language; Jules is Austrian, and drops into German a couple of times in the movie, just for a line or two, and Werner sounded totally different.)

(He reminds me very much of Jo le Suedois in Rififi: that weird subtext of the blond German actor in France, not long after the war. They call him Suedois, the Swede -- probably after the character in Hemingway's short story "The Killers," already by then a Burt Lancaster movie -- as if that's meant to soften his Teutonic aggression or something. Anyway, I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Jo is a doomed innocent, too young and too aggressive ever to succeed in the criminal demimonde of his mentor.)

10:43am: One thing I will say of Riders of the Purple Sage is that there are riders, and they spend a lot of time in the sage. And it's always purple. Reassuringly, Zane Grey is not the sort for thesauri, so the sage is never lavender, mauve, or any other color. By gum, it's purple sage, so he calls it purple sage.( Read more... )

10:34pm: It is absolutely bucketing rain outside, and yet the Red Sox cannot suspend (or heavens forfend, curtail) the game they're playing, because they just took the lead in the bottom of the still-ongoing 8th. And it's the Yankees, of course, or the game would be over an hour ago. They can call it as soon as the inning changes, but that's two outs and one more Yankees pitcher meltdown from now.

Stupid rules.

ETA: Oh whew, THAT's over!

10:30pm: D'you ever think how, if David Cronenberg had grown up someplace less.... Canadian, he'd have been a goth? He really, really doesn't dress or speak like one, and actually, he might be a little too old for the subcultural critical mass, but --

Yeah, I just watched Dead Ringers, so you don't have to. It is very much a Dude, THERAPY type of movie.

(It's also a movie that isn't science fiction at all, which is the genre he's most famous for, and on a nothing budget. It uses the tools of science fiction -- in one case, literally grotesque steel tools -- to tell a story that's outré but not contrareal.)

And on the one hand, I think it says interesting subversive things about masculinity, gender, morbidism, and integrity of identity. And on the other hand, it's one of those movies that literally uses women's bodies as canvases on which the male protagonists write their drama. And on the third hand, the female lover is the only character with any sense, any self-knowledge, and the only one who's sane by the end. And on the fourth hand, the grossout factor is disturbingly gendered, like disturbing in a way that turns back again on the person who filmed it, when it's meant only to speak to the disturbedness of the characters.

So I can see why scrappy film-crit analysts write reams and reams about David Cronenberg movies. But I'm not sure I'll be one of those analysts.

9:32am: I saw a common snapping turtle laying eggs next to the bike path entrance on Newton St. this morning. Poor thing, dogs are gonna dig up those eggs faster than you can say Jack Robinson, but she can't know that.

(I didn't bother her. Not that I would under those circumstances, but also, once you've been lunged at by a snapping turtle -- I was helping it out of traffic! I was ensuring it would not become an ex-turtle! -- you tend to leave them alone unless it's absolutely necessary.)

I also discovered that my landlady is even more of a craphound than I am, by dint of putting things out for garbage and having her tell me, "No, leave those in the yard; I might want them." And thus was the equilibrium of crap maintained.

10:42pm: At someone's house, I picked up a discarded copy of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point and read through it a bit while television went on in the background. And on the one hand, Gladwell's a very good writer, expositorily and persuasively; and the breadth of his writing is entertaining. And on the other hand, I got to about page 100 and was like, wait, you're doing it wrong, you're simplifying that thing in a way that isn't warranted, you're creating a misimpression of certainty in service to your shtick! Anybody who knows a thing about social psychology will be able to nitpick that! Malcolm, I expect better of you.

(It wasn't, it turned out, even a particularly insightful shtick. I invented a name for the people on LJ through whom you meet other people back in 2002, when I realized I didn't remember how I'd met certain flist members; I called those meeting-people people "superconnectors" and Gladwell calls their meatspace analogues "Connectors." If only I'd had a book contract, I'd be a millionaire now!)

The book came out 9 years ago, so it's hard to be entirely clear how much of his shtick was picked up after the fact by idiotic marketing manuals (like the Purple Cow book at the corporation that last laid me off) and how much he was actually summarizing and riffing on same. The two categories of writing share a certain unfortunate simplicity when speaking of the human mind and persuasion that bugs me, however. In all the angst of pop-culture understandings of the Stanford prison experiment, nobody ever gets around to talking about the people who didn't fall into the stereotypical social script.

6:54pm: Oh Manny Ramirez. Entitled or dumb, I can't guess. His ex-teammates are all over the radio making funny anti-drug soundbites (only some of them at his expense), all of which sound totally honest. Because baseball is an honest game, yessir.

A month into the season, and I don't think we have a starting pitcher who hasn't shat the bed. Last I checked, Josh Beckett, our ace, had an ERA of 7+! WTF, Beckett? I was going to say that Masterson, a bald journeyman almost completely unremarkable, was the only starter halfway consistent, until he... shat the bed last night. People!

Wakefield is pitching tonight, and Kottaras is his catcher now. We picked him up in a trade a while back, basically to fill the slot Kelly Shoppach left empty when he was traded to Cleveland for Coco Crisp. Kottaras has turned up okay, I guess; he passes some balls but he stops most of them. He's an unremarkable hitter, but that's an unremarkable aspect of his position. He's only a decade younger than his batterymate, which is pretty old for a quasi-rookie. (I don't know whether he saw enough major league time in other organizations to qualify as a rookie in technical terms.) I like watching that rapport develop: Wakefield's not a very demonstrative person. You don't see him swear on the mound, and his face isn't the movie screen some pitchers have. Kottaras does all the gyrating and bounding in that relationship, as he must, because he is the one who has to catch that confounded flutterball.

Jerry Remy had to take a leave of absence from commenting -- lung cancer, it turns out, or rather complications from treatment -- and Eckersley is taking his place in the talky box. Eckersley is unintentionally funny more often than not; his enthusiasm regularly outstrips his ability to form a coherent metaphor. Still, he's got some brains and he's chatty; and if we're lucky he's less of a shill than Remy. He hasn't that folksy thing that Remy has, but folksy does get annoying now and then.

Next week, when the team goes on its (second!) west-coast trip, they'll have Dave Roberts talking it up with Boring Don Orsillo. Won't that be interesting! I'm pleased to see him thrive after his retirement; he's one of those rare players who is both smart and charming. Also, I mean, he could pick his nose on camera and Boston would love him anyway.

8:25pm: Oh, poor fellow. Dustin Pedroia just took third on a batted ball into the outfield and the badly-aimed throw hit him in the crotch as he slid into the base. (No, that doesn't count as an out, or else baseball would be dodgeball.) I'm sure he was wearing a cup, but he still looked... extremely uncomfortable. Poor fellow, had the manager out there to check on him and everything, huddle of four men to talk about the relative health of his nuts. (Actually, more likely, the tendons and nerves that the edges of the cup sit on. I imagine it's like hitting an unfortunately-located funny bone.)

You totally know that is going to be on the not-highlight reel on Sports Center.

I walked this afternoon in the sun, upriver along the banks through the scrub-pines. The wisteria are beginning and lilacs will be full in another few days. Violets are in full flower already. Tulips are old news! I call it summer, despite the fact the only trees fully leafed are the maples. In the middle of my walk, I sat down on a park bench and tapped on the netbook. There is no bad here.

12:14pm: I wish Andrea Smith's Conquest were a much better book. It brings together a lot of ideas and details about the current state of Native American women, but the framework it is trying to build is hampered by crappy writing and deplorable citations. So most of my time reading the book was a mixture of interesting and frustrating, mostly with the frustration winning out, because the interestingness deserves a better showcase.

The basic thesis is that sexism and empire are like two peas in a pod, and that native women get the double-whammy of domination. Smith goes into some detail on the ways that empire and sexism have concatenated to create, for example, oppressively "helpful" birth-control policies and paternalistic control-mechanisms. She connects this sense of control -- compulsory boarding schools, non-autonomous governance decisions, cops instead of community counseling -- with environmental neglect and destruction and the pervasiveness of violence in native communities. All of which is important and worthwhile, and often connects directly to experiences of other marginalized communities: the imagery of invisibility; how short-term and emergency-oriented solutions don't address the long-term; concepts of reparations; the influence of economic position on health; the ways that even widespread, unintentional neglect can affect one disadvantaged group more than most other groups. It's a book that works directly with intersectionalities of many kinds, and brings them together in worthwhile ways.

The problems with Smith's argumentation, however, are numerous. Her paragraphs are a succeeding array of thesis followed by quotation, but without sufficient (or in many cases any) development of how that quotation strengthens her thesis. The book needs to be about 100 pages longer for her to exposit properly the connections she is making. Her generalizations are sloppy (native societies were peaceful pre-contact [p. 68]? Really, all of them?) and sometimes unintentionally hilarious (she describes the caloric waste inherent in a meat-based diet as if many native societies -- including ones she's just been talking about -- were not primarily meat-eaters [p. 71]). Smith also flirts a couple of times with conspiracy theory, in ways that I find baffling: in 2004, she couldn't have known that the British controversy over the MMR vaccine would turn out to be fraudulent, but I did expect her to have more skepticism towards a movement driven primarily by affluent white women and their privileging their children's health over the health of the general populace.

Which is unfortunate. Because I do want to read a book about how pre-contact societies might have had different social schemata and different unresolved problems that each interacted differently with the European schema being forcibly imported. I want to read a book about the history of pan-native coalition building. I want to read a book about informed consent, and NIMBY politics, and the ambiguities of nation and sovereignty. I want to read a book about living in the tension of constant, reasonable distrust of government. I just don't think Smith's book is any of those books, not really.

In a nonfiction work (especially an academic one, which I'm not sure this is), citations are your lifeblood; they're what people have instead of having to take your word for it. Smith commits such citation crimes as sourcing an entire paragraph on the history of Gulf War Syndrome to a single article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Exposition on various undisputed chemical facts are sourced to website fact-sheets put out by groups with an obvious stake, when any encyclopedia of chemistry would be a less-assailable source that tells you the same thing. Also, and for this most college writing courses would flunk her, she cites a version of Wikipedia. (Only the once, that I saw.) And she never provides page numbers! (Or explains when she's citing a secondary source that quotes a primary source, what that primary source is. In most cases it's obvious -- in one case, I knew exactly whose words she was quoting! -- but it was weird that she did not provide that obvious and necessary context.) Clearly that's an editorial decision, but it's the kind of decision that creates the appearance of sloppiness, or of hand-waving. It says, "I don't want you following my tracks," and that is suicide for nonfiction.

I actually flirted with the idea that perhaps Smith was performing some kind of publishing experiment, whereby all potential citations to government or institutional resources were excised because they might be biased against her argument. But you don't just do that without explaining that's what you're doing; and if you are going to do that, you don't get to ignore almost all government sources except for one or two rightfully scathing GAO reports. It makes a strong argument look weak, and the argument is too strong and too deserving of attention to be sidetracked by the appearance of weakness.

In some ways, I think I have a basic temperamental antipathy toward the book because it is radical, and because quite a lot of radical writing is not particularly designed to convince anybody but fellow radicals. I often find radical writing bereft of background, riddled with undefined vocabulary, vague in its solutions, and requiring me to accept a wide array of assumptions in order to follow the argument at all. So that's a caveat against my opinion, I guess. Still, any book that can inspire me to blurt, "Oh you did not!" while reading on the bus (in re the Wikipedia endnote), may not be the best vehicle for getting across any kind of argument at all.

9:44am: Wired wants you all to know that the pony car has turned 45 years old. A breeze through that gallery proves that the western world completely lost any claim to aesthetics in about 1973. (I would say 1971, but the 2-door 71 Impala is still kind of cute.)

Unrelatedly, I read a report yesterday to the effect that Wired has lost 50% of its ad revenue in the past mumblemany months. That... sounds bad. I would otherwise have said, "I have no idea how magazines make money!" but it turns out that the magazines themselves don't know either.

9:50am: Spring waxes warm and bright, and so it must be time for network television to replay an epic Charlton Heston Biblical drama.

Let the record show that I did not know in advance when I sat down to my mending pile with The Ten Commandments that it would feature Vincent Price as a minor villain. Yul Brynner and his magnificent thighs I knew about, and Heston being oppressed like in Ben-Hur only with less of a gay BDSM twinge, but I swear I had no idea that Edward G. Robinson would appear shirtless in robes. I swear.

(For all it's about 4.5 hours with commercial breaks, I was amused to discover that the titular commandments actually get 15 minutes at the very end. I mean, the title is a spoiler, but also, if you're going to name it that perhaps you could spend a little less time on the mechanics of obelisk-placement and more time on the climbing up and down of significant mountains, hey?)

Except for Yul Brynner and his magnificent thighs, none of it is quite campy enough to entertain any more. (Anyway, I rarely find Heston campy; he's just too earnestly bad.) I wonder if it will disappear some time soon, like Douglas Sirk melodramas, or whether someone will work up a sing-along version and keep it alive for another generation. Anyway, the mending got done.

In other news, I feel as if I should ask for a Dreamwidth code, because everybody else is doing it, but I don't know when I'll have the time or the energy to investigate this strange new apparatus. Having to agonize all over again about presentation, aliasing, reading lists and etiquette -- bleah.

4:28pm: I slept most of Sunday and watched movies. Forthwith:

( The Bank Job )

( Gone Baby Gone )

( Half-Nelson )

And it is bucketing rain on this the opening day of the baseball season. Wah.

7:49pm: I wish I liked Julia Serano's Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (2007) better than I do. It's a book -- rather, a collection of essays wrestled into book format -- about feminism from the MTF perspective, by an author who has been a man and is now a woman. It's strongest as memoir, as personal testimony; I wasn't surprised to discover she's a poet/spoken-word performer. As a work of argument, though, I found it didn't work as well.

Or well, I know it's a tough row to hoe, to explain and argue the complexities of biology, psychology, desire, and behavior. To do it properly you basically have to invent a new critical vocabulary, because the concepts have historically overlapped and been mashed together and been mistaken for one another. Serano is writing for a popular audience rather than a theoretical one, so she sort of jury-rigs the existing vocabulary; this probably helps the average reader but I found it sloppy and confusing. I'd read a whole baffling chapter that I thought was about something new to me, only to realize in the last graf that she was describing a concept I already had a name for, a different name for, and it had taken me 800 words to figure out what she was referring to. The chapter that supplies her subtitle never does actually say outright "I reclaim that word feminine", as if Serano doesn't expect her audience to be familiar with or able to draw a parallel to the changing history of queer.

The end result was that I felt like I was fluctuating between Trans 101 and 201: 101, as I puzzled at seemingly-unfamiliar concepts and then 201 as I mumbled, "Oh, wait, I knew that already." Serano spends a long time debunking feminist tunnel vision of some wave other than mine -- Germaine Greer, Mary Daly, the Michigan Womyn's Festival, which frankly I'd only ever heard of in context of the exclusion of trans people! --, and I think that might be very eye-opening and difficult for that-wave feminists to work through; but I'm not of that wave, and have spent my whole adult life with a healthy skepticism for it. (On about page 300 I went and looked up Serano's age, because I was totally convinced she was as old as my mother. She's not.)

So the book's a fine manifesto, and a good memoir, and provides a perspective on womanhood from someone who chose it consciously in adulthood. It's not the work I want it to be; but I think if it were -- if it were a dispassionate work of theory -- then nobody but me and graduate students would read it. I had the book lying around this past weekend, and my mother saw the cover and said, "Oh, that looks interesting," and I think that it would probably be a useful book for her. The last chapter is one of the best ones, I think, as she wraps up various threads in an essay about how being a revolutionary can become its own orthodoxy, with its own forms of oppression, and that the whole point is to flatten the hierarchy of oppressions, not replace one structure with another. And that's a point I can definitely agree with.

6:14pm: Michael Clayton is Tony Gilroy's first movie (I have been reading many happy reviews of his second, Duplicity), although he's been a screenwriter for years. And it shows, I think; the structure is complex and the reveals leisurely, as with a director who expects the audience to keep up. Most of all what I liked about it in retrospect, that did not leap out at me on the first viewing, was that its star, George Clooney, spent the entire movie devoid of his customary charm. That is Clayton's job, charm; he persuades cops and lawyers and crazypants entitled people to back down and negotiate; but Clayton is never charming onscreen. He's just tired, dragging through the stresses of his job, defeated and struggling to handle that fact.

Actors are never uncharming. That's their trade, really. Around him, Tom Wilkinson is chewing up the scenery in grand fashion, and various professionals are sparking right and left -- even (especially) Tilda Swinton, playing an unpleasant woman who is nonetheless riveting -- and there's George, not even a black hole but just a mumble on the edge of the screen. It's curious, and for the first time I looked at him and saw him aging: his slab cheeks beginning to fall and the bags under his eyes and it was a surprise to realize his hair is all gray. I was pleased to see it; despite his obvious intelligence I'm not consistently convinced George Clooney can act. He really seemed to be acting.( Read more... )

4:12pm: I saw my first open crocus about a week ago, and snowdrops today while walking. The daffodil leaves are a hand high, and the tulips not much shorter, so it's possible to believe that spring is really here. I remember winters that went later than this one, and crocus fighting their way up through the snow, but I don't remember a winter as relentless as this one: snow after snow after snow, and bitter cold for weeks on end, no respites, and the dull rime of ice on everything and the boredom of the same array of sweaters every day.

I'm ready for it to be over. I do remember the one time it snowed in Connecticut on April 6, so I'm not putting the coats away yet; but I'm definitely ready for it to be over. I give the landscape one week of total dun, and then will begin demanding buds and leaflets of every type.

8:47am: I don't really have a grasp how I learned anything at all about Congo/Zaire. American classrooms just don't cover it, or much of Africa at all, except maybe in geography (I vaguely remember distinguishing my Guineas from my Ghanas). I know when I read Heart of Darkness in highschool that the demoralizing slavery described in the opening chapters was a critique of the Belgian Congo. I used to read the print New York Times as an adolescent, so I knew who Mobutu was, and I knew he was a dictator, and I had a general idea that the US had propped up a lot of shitty governments (in Africa as in Asia as in South America) in the name of anti-communism. But I didn't really know anything beyond that.

Raoul Peck's Lumumba (in French, with English subtitles) fills in a couple of those gaps, portraying the very short life of Congolese democracy, between the date of independence (June 30, 1960) and the date of execution of its first Prime Minister (January 17, 1961). Patrice Lumumba was a beer salesman before he got into politics, and by got into politics under the Belgian colonial system the film mostly means making speeches and then getting arrested and beaten up. At 36, he was released from prison and flown directly to independence talks in Brussels, still covered with bruises. He helps negotiate independence, goes home, wins an election, and things immediately go to shit.

The film works in references rather than outright history lessons, so if you're totally ignorant about Africa in the 20th century you might struggle to comprehend why De Gaulle giving up Algeria was a death knell for Belgian control of its slice of Africa. The mendacity and greed of the colonizers is summed up in the opening sequence of turn-of-the-century still photographs, and a few brief conversations about how easy it is to set up an ex-colony to fail and return to lucrative dependent status. An ex-colony whose black citizens have been purposefully undereducated, kept in servile positions, disallowed from politics -- they have no experience of peaceful democracy, only of the decaying Belgian-colonial police state.

You see them at it, crowded rooms of black men negotiating and arguing and sweating over drafts of public lectures. Lumumba gets a couple of rousing speeches before Parliament (here a smaller-than-average lecture hall). You see him working at it, more and more desperately, convinced that he can find a way if only everyone will play ball. But they won't: the parties can't unify; one province (not-coincidentally, the one with the diamond mine in it) threatens to secede; the Force Publique, where no black man has ever risen above Sergeant, revolts and riots in the streets. Lumumba appoints Mobutu as his military man because there's nobody else to hand, and Mobutu turns out to be not exactly the principled citizen-soldier one might hope for; Lumumba appeals to the UN, and finds them helpless to restore order; at a last resort, Lumumba finds himself considering aid from the USSR, and that's the point at which the Americans start showing up, and things unravel after that.

As played by Eriq Ebouaney, Lumumba is a charismatic man, a bit guarded except with family, comfortable and trim in that close-cut clothing of the early 1960s. He's not a fast-talker, and not particularly a genius, just a man trying to keep the country from chaos and keep the factions from open war and willing to put himself forward as the man who makes decisions and mistakes.

You know what happens in the end. It's the ending a lot of western dramas about fragile African democracy riff on: his capture, the mortifications of his imprisonment, his summary execution and the secret disposal of his body. It's not so simple as the Americans handing power to Mobutu -- it's another year or so before he takes complete power -- but it's obvious that the country will not be allowed to work out its own problems, not if that cuts into profit and comfort for the wrong people. The final sequence intercuts Lumumba's death with a ceremony showing Mobutu's rise into baroque opulence, leopard-print hat and throne on a dais. And then the final appropriation: Mobutu orders a moment of silence for the Congolese hero tragically cut down in the birth-struggles of the nation. It is not in Mobutu's interest to mention who did that cutting-down.

It turns out that the director, Raoul Peck, was Haitian by birth, and raised in Congo as part of a whole class of Haitian professionals and academics: basically, the country imported its black Francophone intelligentsia wholesale, to get over the post-colonial shortage of same. He describes in a companion documentary, excerpted on DVD, his life and history in Congo, how he learned about Lumumba. The documentary shows footage of Lumumba from the early 60s, shocking stuff, the moreso because I'd just seen it done faithfully in fictional format: coming off the plane in Brussels, bandages visible on his wrists as his fellow nationalists fall into his arms; speaking before a crowd; and then Lumumba in short sleeves, rope twined over and over around his arms, manhandled and stuffed into the back of a truck while the western media shout questions at him. He doesn't speak in that last, doesn't make eye-contact with the camera. He knows what's coming.

That extras documentary ends with a note from the director that the footage he's just used costs $3000 a minute in copyright fees (to the Beeb, I think, or some old English newsreel company). Considering, he explains, that the average Congolese makes $150 a year, is it any wonder that history and the lessons of history are so hard to pass on?

9:06am: An Exciting Commute
I got on the early bus this morning just in time for one of its rear tires to explode. The bus had pulled up with its rear end making weird low popping noises, alarming but not explosion-alarming, more like something rotating in a way it shouldn't so that it tapped the road every other second. Then, kerblooey.

We all filed off and crammed onto the next one, while the limping bus -- its deficit not particularly visible, but when a bus blows up on you, you don't argue about its carrying you any further -- rattled off to who-knows-where. It's an electrified line, so there are a limited number of places it can have gone, but we didn't see it again.

10:13pm: I have become constitutionally disinclined to superheroes as I've grown older, mostly I think just because I'm no longer fooled by the woo-hoo simplicity and because the concept's basic absurdity becomes more obvious with time rather than less. I think another partial culprit, though, is that superhero movies have gotten more ambitious, which makes the strain of their absurdity much more obvious. When it's no longer kids' stuff, when it's not just watching the plates spin and hoping they don't fall, then a whole different set of reading protocols kick in, and I become way less forgiving.

(This would be a dual explanation for why I loathed Batman Begins. On the one hand: there is no point in having your little secret fantasy of fascist skull-busting if you don't make the fascism any fun. Show not called Batman Dourly Scrubs The Bathtub, okay? And on the other hand, dudes, if you're making a SRS BZNS movie? You do not get to punt the laws of physics in the finale. The human body is mostly made of water, you know.)

So, I finally sat down to watch Iron Man. I cannot read this text outside the context of two responses that sprang up after it: the vid Handlebars by deejay (song by the Flobots) and "The Kids Aren't All Right" by samdonne. The former cuts down the film's own imagery to its basics: iconic poses and the fantasy of righteous unilateralism set to lyrics about increasingly megalomaniacal and apocalytic one-upsmanship. The latter is purportedly a Vanity Fair article, describing Tony Stark in the year since he went public about his secret identity. Or really, it's an article about how the world adapts to Iron Man, how righteous unilateralism would actually work in the real world, how action short-circuits, stunts, and substitutes poorly for the eternal yammering of the democracy it purports to keep safe.

That means I can't regard the villains in Afghanistan as "the bad guys," even when it turns out they're a for-profit, for-hire enterprise. I can't watch secondary (even tertiary) characters get churned to pieces and consider it shits and giggles. Tony Stark's intervention isn't just imperial, isn't just the white man's burden to fix those benighted natives: it is literally a scorched-earth program to punish those who would capture an American. You don't get to burn people to death and then say in the same breath that you're against weapons proliferation. Or: you can say it, but I can laugh in your face and call you an asshole.

I think if the film had been half an hour shorter, it could have been a plate-spinning enterprise: all whizbang and techno-excitement and look what my new iPod can do, and pretend that the world has a politics-free zone in which such games can be played. (It would appear, sadly, that the politics-free zone only allows women in as secretaries and whores. Which... seriously? I think it was meant to be a parody, but it's the sort of parody that merely fetishized what it pretends to interrogate.) I might have been able to like that movie, except for the whores.

So to be ambitious in a superhero film can make it worse, not better. In this case, far worse: it yokes whizbang and the engineering ethic to things that are not to be engineered. You can't just build a gadget to fix a major problem of world history -- not unless your idea of "fixing" is to destroy everything and everyone who disagrees with you.

And that is why I didn't like Iron Man.

12:32pm: The nature of slavery in America, as defined by the courts over successive generations, is that white people by definition are not slaves, and that slaves are by definition not white.

The story of Sally Miller has, it turns out, been told at least twice before, around the turn of the last century. But John Bayley, a legal historian, takes another crack at it in The Lost German Slave Girl, because it's that good a story. And because the two previous accounts, of a slave woman in New Orleans who sued for freedom on basis of being a white immigrant from Alsace, both tell the story with the assumption implicit that Mary Miller and Salomé Müller are the same person. It's one story when you assume that it's a downtrodden white girl, shockingly pressed into slavery as an orphaned child, being rescued by the immigrant community that recognizes her and reclaims her in her early thirties. It's another story entirely when it's possible -- likely -- that Mary Miller was a mixed-race slave who lucked into a case of mistaken identity and ran with it.

It's a legal thriller in Bayley's hands; he chronicles each step of the court cases and appeals and sidetracks into other hilarious/appalling legal cases about the borders of blackness and freedom. (Like the one in Alabama where a light-skinned slave woman and her children displayed their bare feet to the jury, and won their freedom thereby; their feet were so obviously white people's feet (??) that the judge proclaimed it impossible they could remain slaves.) Each fact fits differently into the competing schemata of plaintiff and defense, and the case advances on crappy memories, visual similarities, and a thorough lack of documentary evidence.

Salomé Müller was a three year old child when her family survived a horrible trans-Atlantic trip to New Orleans and found themselves so badly in debt that they had to sell themselves into indentured servitude. She and all her immediate family disappeared downriver, leaving behind cousins, kin, and fellow-travelers in New Orleans. No definitive word ever came, just rumors about a father dead and a son disappeared and maybe the two sisters left behind somewhere. And then, 25 years later, in a street outside a bar, an elderly German woman recognizes the long-lost child in the form of an olive-skinned, straight-haired woman who dresses and talks like a black slave. The plaintiff's attorney spins a tale of a rich planter's family that took her in and plotted to make a slave of her (for reasons never explained), while the defense seeks out proof that she'd been a slave all her life, that she was bought from a slaver in Mobile at age eleven, that she really is black or black enough that slavery is allowable. Guests in her owner's household remember her as a slave, but are surprised to be queried whether they remember her as a slave only because she was treated like one. She did or did not have a German accent when she was young. She bore her first child at thirteen, or at ten years of age. She told people she had Indian blood, or she remembered nothing of her background. She had characteristic birthmarks on her thighs, or she didn't, or the German child didn't but the woman does, or vice versa.

Late-on, a birth certificate shows up all the way from Alsatia, that seems like it should carry the day (it describes the birthmarks). But it also proves that the memories of all the German witnesses are mixed up, and that the German child was five instead of three. Another record of birth, a baptismal record in French, shows that a slave belonging to Miller named Mary bore a child long enough ago that the German child would have had to give birth implausibly young. But there are two Marys and three Bridgets in the Miller household at that time, and the Millers have no compunction about changing their slaves' names at the drop of a hat. Every piece of evidence adds to the ambiguity rather than detracting from it. Even during the appeals process, when the defense tracked down another woman who could have been Salomé, who fit into the schema of the two sisters abandoned downriver, the facts were no less muddy: she changed her story, she might have been the other sister, she might have been bribed, she might have been anybody.

Mary Miller aka Sally Miller aka Bridget Wilson aka Salomé Müller was freed eventually. The court decided that because they could not prove her blackness, she must be white, and therefore free. But they didn't free her three living children, despite the condition of slavery being matrilineal. Their mother sued for their rescue, but the money ran out and the court was in uproar and the lawyers got tired and the German community let it go. Rumor had it that the freed woman ended up in California, married (to a white man), but nobody's really sure.

Because this history is only available through court records, it is impossible to characterize how the Germans became sure this woman was Salomé. One can assume she was Salomé, or one can work through the cleverness required to lead on a series of witnesses who want to believe it, ask smart questions and leave conversational gaps that provide the opportunity for others to fill in the blanks with their own surety. The woman who was freed never claimed to remember her childhood on the trans-Atlantic ship; she never remembered a word of German; she never stood out in front and played the drama. She let the German community, especially the middle-aged wives who had known the child, stand out in front and make claims on her behalf. Although Bayley has no more proof than anyone had at the time, he believes that the woman who was freed was in fact Bridget (and then Mary) Wilson Miller, born in slavery.

It's a different story from that perspective, isn't it? It becomes her narrative and not the narrative of her rescue by the German community. Despite the fact she never testified and never wrote (she laboriously learned to sign her name and nothing more), it's a story that she orchestrated and influenced and of which she is the hero.

10:59pm: Recent Reading
Because I finally have finished several books that sat half-read around my house for weeks/months. Mostly nonfiction.

Royce, Sarah. A Frontier Lady: Recollections of the Gold Rush and Early California. Ralph Henry Gabriel, ed. Bison Books, 1932.( Read more... )

Carvalho, Solomon Nunes. Incidents of Travel and Adventure in the Far West with Colonel Fremont's Las Expedition. Originally published by Derby and Jackson, 1858; reprinted 2004 by Bison Books.( Read more... )

Carson, Christopher.Kit Carson's Autobiography. Milo Milton Quaife, ed. Bison Books, 1935.( Read more... )

Allende, Isabel. Zorro. Margaret Sayers Peden, tr. Harpercollins, 2005.( Read more... )