A Queen & her Death

Today in 1536, Anne Boleyn stood trial, was found guilty, and was sentenced to die. I admit, I've been toying this post in my head for a few days now, just trying to get all the contours correct. Here is the little I've gathered

Her Majesty

1) Mary Boleyn bore Henry VIII a son of noble blood while he was married to Katharine of Aragon. Mary was Anne's sister.

2) Amongst the lords who sat in her judgment were her father and her uncle, who it is now believed jointly pushed her toward King Henry VIII in the first place.

3) Anne's cousin, Catherine Howard, was Henry's fifth wife, and also beheaded.

4)Anne's daughter, Elizabeth I, takes the throne after Edward, Mary, and Lady Jane Grey die, making her reign during the time of the Renaissance and the Age of Exploration one of longest in British history.

Lesson: Nothing has women's backs in History like Time. Time will F*** you up if you mess with women. Heed the warning dudes. Heed it.

What I have always found interesting is the larger drama these theatrics allowed England as a state to play. Related to both the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope, Henry VIII could not divorce Katharine, nor treat her in any way unbefitting a queen and thus, the tensions that had been brewing for generations in England, between the power of the state and the church, came to a head (aww, bad pun, my apologies) upon the head of Anne Boleyn. In fact, in my small estimation, the only 'crime' Anne committed was being jealous of the sway Sir Thomas More and Cardinal Woolsey had over her husband. Whether by her influence, the desires of those around her, or simply due to human nature, both of these men were also terminated in the saga.

film still, Dakota Blue Richards (Lyra) +
Daniel Craig (Asriel) in the 2007 film, The Golden Compass

But what Henry did in making himself head of the Church in England, taking Woolsey's estates into royal protection, and in so doing, founding a new branch of Christianity is startling. All the more so, because I"ve just finished my once-a-decade read of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials. I've got, as they say, Lyra Silvertongue (nee Belacqua), witches, Lord Asriel, and Will Parry on the brain. But the moment I love, perhaps more than all others  is when Lyra 'meets' her Death. And I wonder: there, in the tower, did Anne meet it, and was she startled? By all accounts, she conducted herself with bravery and generosity at the end. Is this what happens when figure that was always there draws near? Is it easier to know it is coming---that it is welcome and expected, or is it more a comfort, once we cease to breathe - that some part of ourselves, exist to take our hand, and lead us, beyond?

So, in honor of a queen, a fictional, but scrappy young woman, and a Death, here are a few others who have not only changed the world, but who have met their Births, or their Deaths, on this day:

- L. Frank Baum (b.1856)
- Emily Dickinson (d. 1886)
- Jasper Johns (b. 1930)
-Madeleine Albright (b. 1937)

How I Learned to Love Amy March

* for Megan

Of all the March sisters, Amy was always my least favorite. She was vain; she was vindictive; she was blonde; she 'stole' Laurie AND Europe away from Jo. In a novel full of proud, thoughtful, complicated women, Amy was, to my eyes, merely a child.

My good friend Megan is more generous. While I rant on and on about my desire to cut Amy out of Little Women completely, Megan 1) pats my knee in understanding, and 2) casts her magic fishing pole of cultural theory out into the shifting waters of the river of life, the hook settling deep below the riverbed - where the catfish are! - and comes up with an unsettling thought: "But without Amy, how can we fully appreciate the many facets of human longing? Without Amy's growth to guide us, how would the reader know when s/he, at last, is grown up?" This shuts me up faster than a lover asking me to spend the night.

What a cruel joke it is to learn as one nears 30yo that the character one has detested for nearly two decades is the one we must embrace to finally grow into the self we are meant to be. If you, like me, have felt guilty about heeding that voice at the nape of the neck or the back of the skull or the pit of your stomach that cries, "me, me, me!" and have buried it so far down as to make it seem alien, what does it mean, to consciously, if begrudgingly, let it up for air, let it shake its golden locks in the sun, and heed its call of, "I'm pretty and needy! Attend me!" And if embracing that part of us - let's call it our fire self - is a true sign that we are maturing, what does Amy become, after she turns down the advances of Fred Vaughan, after she paints March House, after she marries?

Yesterday and today, in a state of peri-pathetic whining and self-pity, I picked up my copy of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and turned to the pages where Peter Walsh is confessing to Clarissa his love for the wife of an Indian Major in the campaigns. "[...] as she sat back extraordinarily at ease with him and light-hearted, all in a clap it came over her, If I had married him, this gaiety would have been mine all day!" and then, on the next page, "'Peter! Peter!' cried Clarissa, following him out on the landing. 'My party to-night! Remember my party to-night!' she cried, having to raise her voice against the roar of the open air..."

And it hit me like a ton of marble, or like the orange piers of the Golden Gate Bridge crashing threw the fog, or when you realize that the gods you learned about from your parents would never be the gods you felt in your heart or saw out the corner of your eyes: Amy grows into Clarissa Dalloway! Amy March, like her sisters, is more ether than granite, always moving, a subtle, ferocious cat, a pent-up flood just waiting for a crack in the dam to spill forth and flood the city built carelessly on marsh-land. For those of us who always felt Josephine March was perfection, is Amy not the sister most similar to her? Louisa May Alcott does not show us Jo as a younger child and for this, we as readers are eternally thankful: we do not have to bear witness to Jo's 'first' becomings - her white lies, her tricks on Meg, her mean-spirited casting of Beth as the perpetual villain in her juvenalia: we encounter a Jo already on the cusp of womanhood, and all the more stronger and more loyal for her childhood transgressions...but in Amy, Ms. Alcott is brave enough to let us see behind the veil of human development, and this is tremendous. For it is an honesty that both un-nerves and strengthens...isn't this what Miss Kilman feels when she says of Clarissa "her life was a tissue of vanity and deceit?" Even this indictment is given as an invective for a character to finally describe themselves; Clarissa offers a bulwark for Miss Kilman to set herself apart, to access the ways in which she is different, and similar from the women around her. And this, is such a gift.

I felt somewhat guilty admitting this: that I often consider fictional characters in light of other characters from other worlds, other novels. Is it right to have to turn to 1920s London life to finally be at peace with Amy March, the transcendentalist-turned-European artist of late 19th century Concord, Mass.? I have no answer save the knowledge that it feels right, that I often do this in real life, re-evaluating my feelings for one person in light of the ways they interact with/remind me of/engage with others. And, as I also know, any character who contemplates "love and religion" for pages as they have tea, buy clothes, and set about the streets of London shopping for a party is, for me, a high arbiter of human nature.

Today in 1925, Mrs. Dalloway was published. Not my favorite of Woolf's jewels, but no less stunning for that. No. No less stunning for that.

Rumination: Gatsby's Theme

~ for Sean P. McAvoy

for  Pier Dominguez

H/history.

How many times have we thought, mused, chanted, been warned, "I must not repeat the past?" And yet, how many times have we heard, thought, mused, desired, "If I could only go back in time..." or "If I could just see person x or teacher y one more time, I would..."?

My friend Pier has taken to asking me at various moments, hauntingly-sardonic, full of melancholic beauty, "What are you searching for, Horace Ballard?" It is a big question, a huge question, THE question. And in trying to answer  honestly ("G-d?" "love?" "a place...somewhere?" "happiness?"), I often have no answer. And I can only smile at him, searchingly, half-believing that no one could phrase such a cataclysmic bomb of a question unless s/he already knew the answer.

Last week a group of friends and I went to see Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby. As doctoral students in the humanities with various interests, but each in his or her turn pertaining to "America," this was not a social outing; this was akin to a seminar in high culture. Even I, who prefer to see movies alone, loved the crowded crush of the theatre, as if a high priest of that exclusive, tenured fraternity called an Ivy League professor were about to wax poetic on Emerson. I wore my grandfather's ring and purple socks. It was that kind of atmosphere.

The film - like all adaptations of incredible books - disappointed. However, this is not to say I did not like it; rather, I found the choices alternatively interesting or distracting, if not downright brazen. I think Leonardo DiCaprio was perfectly cast as the title character. Tobey Maguire looks great in period Brooks Brothers/J.Press fashion, which is what I needed him to do, and the cinematography caused me to reach out my own hand at times, in hopes of grasping that green light at the end of someone's dock.

I left feeling downright envious. I shall always envy Gatsby for knowing just what his heart desires, and the lengths he would go to possess it.

On a blog dedicated to H/history, the sense (for a romantic like myself) that culture and cultural productions can perhaps be summed up by the 'big' events (those taught to us in school) and the less headline-worthy, though more important events of our own lives (ah, what a good little colonial i am!), it is a bit of a wonder that F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby has not come up before. Like all films-cum-complicated messes, The Great Gatsby has remained with me; for better, and for worse now, for several days. So now that 'the great' man himself has arrived at our little party, we can relish in picking him apart.

My dear friend, a Mr. S.P. McAvoy, has taught me many things. The importance of curating one's own personal library, the importance of maintaining standards for one's vices, the world of difference a pocket square can make, that what is spoken of on a smoking porch stays on a smoking porch, and that the only precious gems and metals that never tarnish is the brilliance of true friendship. It was with these lessons in hand that I went to see Gatsby and realized that like Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited (we all knew this comparison was coming!), Gatsby has two great loves in the novel: Daisy, of course, and Nick. What Nick and Gatsby are in need of, but never say, is friendship. And for one all too brief summer, triangulated between the City, West Egg parties, and East Egg meals, they almost find it.

Both are loners. One is born to privilege but embarrassed by it, and one is embarrassed by his lack of privilege, and goes to enormous lengths to hide it. Both are men of their time, or horatii - that glorious Koine Greek genus that means, time and beauty interchangeably, or, better still, the capacity to be beautiful in one's time. Both are tied to Daisy; both envy, detest, and are fascinated by Tom Buchannon. Neither belongs where they are, and both, almost ask, almost suggest, almost grapple at the implications behind the words: "I haven't a friend in the world, methinks. Will you/can you, even if you know the best and worst of me, be a friend?"

It is a subtle point, friendship in F.Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece. But I think it is an important one. And I am thankful to those in my life who have allowed me to see it.

Lingua Franca

John Everett Millais, Yes, or No?, 1871, YUAG

The way sentient beings communicate to each other is fascinating. There are almost universal gestures in human communities that convey the ideas of 'stop', 'happy', 'listen', eat. There are regional and group specific gestures, signs, and slang. And then there are the myriad of ways that the non-human world of animals, plants, and microbes- inter- and intra- -communicate to each other. So with all these ways and modes, it is understandable that two people with a shared history, are bound to mis-communicate from time to time. Language is a tool that evolves through us and around us; a word I use today may have a different resonance or cast a broader shadow next week, depending on its use by a politician, my 'discovery' of an older meaning, or a Freudian slip.

Yesterday was the end of an age for me. Yet another affair of the heart, ended. I knew the moment he picked the film, "Closer" to watch last Sunday after dinner. I knew it the moment we had vastly different interpretations of the characters and their needs. I knew it in the way he made the human heart into platitudes of black and white simplicity. I knew it when his barrage of banter during sex proved noisome rather than erotic, and I wanted to say, "Shut up" and "Stop talking." I knew it when his texting --which was always sweet -- began to annoy me and the hours that went by in which I had no semiotic sign of his ardor proved more exciting to me than the voice messages perched like a skull on the screen of my smart phone, threatening to ruin my mood with twitterings of love. 

The last two times I saw him, I thought to myself, "you do not do you do not do anymore" (thanks Sylvia P.!) How can two people who have shared food, thoughts, drugs, feel such incongruous desire? I felt like our time as a glittering mural of two people learning the tremulous steps in the dance of love had come undone. We were shocked to find ourselves painted in unstable a medium as water-color; we were amazed to see how easily we could wash off.

Today in 1828, Noah Webster copyrighted the first edition of his dictionary. This to me is a fascinating idea. On the surface, it appears that Webster is patenting both language and a product: his definitions, his visual apparatus for printing the tome's pages, his approach. But in reality, this was a political move. The cousin of statesman Daniel Webster, Noah petitioned his cousin to get an American copyright bill through Congress and the states during the early Federal period. As an itinerant teacher for some years, Webster believed that primary school education in the newly-formed U.S. was grueling and too scattered--a one-room school room often composed of up to 70 students of all ages, with inadequate print materials. His coming-of-age during the Revolution (and his patronage by some of the founding members of the Federalist party) convinced Webster that the British aristocracy and the Church had "corrupted" the English language by insisting that Greek and Latin were the rudimentary studies of a liberal education. Such a system allowed for wide interpretations of grammatical and phonetic rules.  From 1783-85, Webster published a grammar, a speller, and a reader, respectively--standardizing (or "american-izing") the spelling of certain words and drew upon passages from historical documents and great works of English literature, rather than the Bible. 

What a shift! From the gospels to Romeo + Juliet. From Cantullus to Addison. The same words but tinged with new meanings, new signs and significations, co-opting new powers and new perspectives. Maybe this begins to strike at the heart of those lines Fantine and Jean Valjean sing at the end of Les Miserables:

"And remember, the truth that once was spoken:

'To love another person is to see the face of G-d.'"

Love, like language, moves. It is a garden that must be watered, weeded, fertilized, pruned, and allowed to lie dormant over the winter to replenish the nutrients in the soil. It is not a florist shop where hot-house blooms are always being trucked-in. In order to make love's idioms into our own tools of communication, we must actively re-invest, and re-construct the purposes and motivations behind a hug, a laugh, a fixed meal, and a deep kiss. Like Webster, we must turn ourselves away from the golden picture of abstract perfection that is "happily ever after" and "eternal divine" and seek Providence elsewhere; we must love because we love the messiness, the absurd creations, the lingua franca of love itself. For Love makes sense to no one but Love.

En Temps

Caravaggio, Conversion on the Road to Damascus, 1601

Today is a high holy day. It is the feast of the conversion of St. Paul (observed in the Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Anglican, and Lutheran liturgies). It is the birthday of Virginia Woolf. It is also the birthdays of W. Somerset Maugham, Robert Burns, Etta James, and Alicia Keys. It is a day for candles, for giggling over the "my lord! my lady! my lord! my lady!" passage from Woolf's Orlando, and for contemplating the idea of reinvention and conversion.

You remember the story from the Book of Acts: Saul, a rising star in the Roman provincial counsel and hardline persecutor of the province of Judea, gets on his horse, and sets out on the road to Damascus. Along the way, he meets (as Gandalf the White remarks wryly in LOTR) ‘someone he did not intend’. In a blinding light, Jesus appears to Saul, and in an epiphany that would make Joyce’s Stephen Deadalus cream his pants, Saul becomes Paul, his life’s goals are altered, and the embers of passion are stoked within his heart, a passion that grows into a theological fervor that will eventually make Christianity the state religion of Rome, and ultimately, spread its tenets across the world.

Conversion. Re-invention. Twenty-five days after the beginning of the New Year, what would it be like to stop, and perhaps, start again? What would it be like to pivot on one’s heels, crawl back to bed, and wake up, a different, yet oh so similar you? My favorite Virginia Woolf novel is Orlando: A Biography. The plot is rather simple, a 16^th century lord lives and loves, goes to the ‘orient’ to fight a war, falls asleep, and wakes up a woman---“undoubtedly one and the same person” Woolf contends in her narration, but yet, “there are certain changes.” Oh, how extraordinary. In my young life, Orlando is in the pantheon of texts that have changed me for they felt like home upon their gasp of syntax. Home always changes one; no matter if it is the home you were born in or the home you build yourself.

As I sit here, ten stories above the West Philadelphia skyline, listening to The Magnetic Fields I can't help feeling—watching the sunrise over the Walt Whitman Bridge—that I am finally (after a long repose) en temps-- that I am where I am supposed to be at the time I am supposed to be. I feel as Gregory Corso felt when he wrote:

O my heart! finally
at long last
I am at peace

The half-century war
I hacked at
like an Afric Bushman
hacking bushmasters
is over

I will live
and never know my death

I feel as the Lady Orlando felt when s/he, ran, skipped, and fell down upon the wet green of the moor, and murmured, “I have found my mate…It is the moor…I am nature’s bride” and gave himself, gave herself up to rapture of being. I feel I am Merida, shooting the arrows of fate, battling for time to grow up, competing for her own hand. It is a chilly feeling, across the sides of the spleen and ribs, as if the eyes of heaven have selected this moment to check up on you. Make it count, a whisper, violet and faint, curls about the ears, imitating the countless smoke stacks of SE Pennsylvania and central Jersey. Be extraordinary.

Pictorialist Secession

Steiglitz, "Portrait, Ms. N."

Today is January 1^st— a day where Americans are thought to be at their best, as new year’s resolutions have not yet tarnished. It is also a day of ‘firsts: one’s first meal, one’s first curse word, one’s first outfit, one’s first movie or musical choice…a day where, for a moment, we can do what Americans have always loved to do, which is to shake off the shackles of history, and claim a place in the sun all our own.

In History there are many important firsts that happened on the first day of January. Por ejemplo, Dr. Watson was introduced to Sherlock Holmes (1881), Quakers in Pennsylvania emancipated their slaves (1778), Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major premiered in Leipzig (1879), and regular mail service began between New York and Boston (1673).

In the annals of those born, today is also quite special, esp. for Americans. Paul Revere, Jr. (b. 1735), Alfred Steiglitz (b. 1864), J. Edgar Hoover (b. 1895), and J.D. Salinger (b. 1919). It is for Mr. Steiglitz that this post is named. Sometimes gentle, sometimes overbearing, Steiglitz is considered the main advocate in the early 20^th century for photography as its own art-form. A pioneering pictoralist artist, as well as a writer, editor, critic, and every bit the institutional anarchist, Steiglitz and his coterie (which included Steichen, Weston, O’Keefe, and, early on, the enigmatic F. Holland Day) 'seceded' from the high romantic/empiricist view of photography as a sociological tool and from the gilded age notion of art conoisseurship being maintained in large institutions. They started their own publications and magazines, blurred the lines between high art and the trade press of periodicals, and thus, put America on top, as it were, in the world of art and advertising. 

As I write this from central Virginia, less than an hour from the battlefields of Appomattox and Antietam, both major turning-points in the conflict as we say,  the words 'secession' and 'secede' take on a charged air. In this annus mirabilis now upon us, in this new year, where schedules may have already intruded, but our feet have yet to walk, what would it be to find the things for which we will stand..from which we will secede or remove ourselves...for which we will work for? I am no good at New Year's Resolutions (NYR's), but I am becoming better at yearly concerted efforts (YCE's). Mine are to get to Alaska, make headway on my dissertation, to remember to breathe more. And yours?

Cheers to you, O Steiglitz. Hail! And wherever your soul is, good luck.

Anxiety + Influence

In his 1973 The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom posits that poets are both influenced by, and filled with anxiety because of, prior poets. The romantic quest for the muse of Originality and the goddess of Innovation Bloom argues, encourages 'more-contemporary' poets to express simultaneous admiration and frustration for the work of the poets who inspired them through various means of revision.  Thus, we have the British Romantics and their interest in Satanic-Promethean individualism as a response to Milton, or Hart Crane's The Bridge as a re-working, or, dare I suggest, queering, of Eliot's The Waste Land. 

Such a suggestion of an influence that is troubled seems decidedly human. While it allows Bloom to chart new territory in the genre of literary criticism, it provides us mere mortals with a language to speak of our raissones for doing, saying, making certain things; it lends us a non-combative language by which we can contend with that which came before. It is human nature to want to "make it new". That perfect cheesecake or martini you spend hours perfecting to break out at a party? A revision of another friend's recipe. That brilliant argument made in seminar? A re-working, or new approach to a problem another scholar in your field published in a leading journal that you think is so full of holes it could double as a cheesecloth. The pairing of those red skinny jeans with a blue blazer and a white pocket square? Your joint admiration for a GQ spread and your anxiety over a dilapidated grad student bank account. These are merely hypothetical suggestions, of course. For when I consider Bloom's concept in light of my own work, I am most astounded by my hate-love relationship to the work of John Keats, born today in 1795.

My anxieties about Keats are formidable. He died on my birthday. Every year when I take stocks of the roads traveled and the roads still to tread, Keats' youthful demise at 25 and all the great works accomplished, is enough to freeze my bones. What have I done? What am I about to do? O Jesu! I've survived Keats! Surely the next year must be brilliant. If not, why do I exist? What must I find and where must I seek? I remember these questions occurring with particular ferocity on my 26th birthday. My one consolation was that on his 26th birthday, W.E.B. Du Bois (also born on the same day as me), shared similar thoughts. And while I would never say Keats' work influences me or that I like it or gravitate toward it, its themes of mortality, of love, of praise of simple beauties, does engage the heart of youth. I may never write anything as honest as "Ode to a Nightingale" or as haunting as "Ode to Autumn." But their themes I will always struggle with; Keats himself may not inspire my work in terms of revision, but his ability to be both smaltzy and rigorous, lurid and keen, does influence and definitely produces anxiety.

taken with me own camera from my apt. window in the W. Loop

Postscriptum: 

Good-bye Chicago. Good-bye, thou magical city by the lake. It has been "beyond" in many ways.