Massacre Machinery & Slaughterhouse 5

By Robin Bates | Published: May 25, 2022
Ruins of Dresden in Slaughterhouse Five

Thursday

Chuck Augello, who publishes a website exploring the life and art of Kurt Vonnegut (The Daily Vonnegut), has a Literary Hub article on what the American satirist thought about guns. As a survivor of the firebombing of Dresden, where he was a German prisoner-of-war, Vonnegut had a front-row seat to murderous violence. There was no strategic reason for bombing Dresden, by the way. The British targeted the city, which at the time was filled with refugees as well as prisoners of war, in retaliation for the bombing of London.

Augello notes that, though Vonnegut was an avid collector of old guns before he went to war, that was no longer the case when he returned. His anti-gun sentiments show up in a number of works.

For instance, in his 1970 play Happy Birthday, Wanda June,

Vonnegut satirizes the Hemingway model of masculinity through the main character, Harold Ryan, a World War II vet, big-game hunter, and avid gun enthusiast. At the end of the Third Act, Ryan bellows, “Whoever has the gun … gets to tell everybody else exactly what to do. It’s the American way.” Ryan’s New York apartment is decorated with the pelts of African animals killed for sport. He goads his young son to load a rifle so he can protect his mother from Ryan himself, calling the rifle “an iron penis three feet long.” Throughout the play Ryan’s aggressive “manliness” is symptomatic of a hatred of women born of sexual inadequacy.

In his novel Deadeye Dick (1982), meanwhile, the head of an Ohio arms manufacturing plants boasts “how natural and beautiful it is for Americans to have love affairs with guns.”

In other words, Vonnegut clearly saw how the worship of guns is integrally tied to toxic masculinity.

And then there is this editorial that appears in Vonnegut’s novel Deadeye Dick (not one of his better ones), written by the husband of a pregnant woman who has been killed by someone’s careless use of a gun:

My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance: that something die. There is evil for you. We cannot get rid of mankind’s fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true. I give you a holy word: DISARM.

In one of his own editorials, Vonnetut criticized NRA spokesman Charlton Heston, who celebrated Americans’ accessibility to guns. Vonnegut wrote,

I feel exactly as though he were praising the germs of some loathsome disease, since guns in civilian hands, whether accidental or on purpose, kill so many of us day after day.

It is through Slaughterhouse Five, however, that Vonnegut delivers his most sustained and powerful attack on what he calls “massacre machinery.” Vonnegut used the novel to process his PTSD (see my report of a student’s senior project on the issue), having his protagonist shut down his emotions in the face of the horrors he witnesses. It could be argued that much of America now shuts down its emotions in the face of each new mass shooting.

The phrase “so it goes” captures how Pilgrim shuts down, resorting to the fatalism of a resigned shrug. The words essentially signal that we are helpless and nothing can be done. Slaughterhouse Five appeared early in 1969 and shows Pilgrim using his coping mechanism to process the horrors of 1968:

Robert Kennedy, whose summer home is eight miles from the home I live in all year round, was shot two nights ago. He died last night. So it goes.

Martin Luther King was shot a month ago. He died, too. So it goes.

And every day my Government gives me a count of corpses created by military science in Vietnam. So it goes.

Like Pilgrim, we think we can no more end gun violence than Pilgrim can prevent the British from firebombing Dresden. Of course, this fatalism becomes an out for politicians in the pocket of the gun lobby, who would like us to think that nothing can in fact be done. In other words, they exploit our trauma to line their pockets.

For his part, to lessen the unending cycle of gun violence Pilgrim engages in a significant non-action:

My father died many years ago now—of natural causes. So it goes. He was a sweet man. He was a gun nut, too. He left me his guns. They rust.

In his introductory chapter to Pilgrim’s story, Vonnegut informs us that he passed along something far more life affirming than firearms to his own sons:

I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee.

I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that.

Allow me to express my own contempt—and my horror—at all those who have made America a haven for gun violence. They may wear $1000 suits, but they have blood on their hands.

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A Poem for Uvalde’s Grieving Families

By Robin Bates | Published: May 24, 2022
Van Gogh, Sorrowing Old Man

Wednesday

As I think of those families mourning those children who died in the Uvalde Elementary School mass shooting, I find myself remembering, as though it were yesterday, when I lost my own son. Poetry could not stop the pain, but poetry gave me the only words that came anywhere close to addressing my agony. I therefore send out this Conrad Aiken poem to all who are experiencing wrenching heartbreak tonight.

God bless you all.

Bread and Music
By Conrad Aiken

Music I heard with you was more than music,
And bread I broke with you was more than bread;
Now that I am without you, all is desolate;
All that was once so beautiful is dead.

Your hands once touched this table and this silver,
And I have seen your fingers hold this glass.
These things do not remember you, belovèd,
And yet your touch upon them will not pass.

For it was in my heart you moved among them,
And blessed them with your hands and with your eyes;
And in my heart they will remember always,—
They knew you once, O beautiful and wise.

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Which Poets Should Ukraine Honor?

By Robin Bates | Published: May 23, 2022
Vasyl Stus, Ukrainian poet who died in a Soviet prison

Tuesday

Along with Ukraine’s horrific war with Russia, there’s a secondary battle unfolding in the country, one involving statues and street names honoring poets. Trivial though that may sound in light of Russia’s genocidal slaughter, as I’ve been noting it’s actually attempted genocide in a different key. Having seen literature used to erase their identity, the Ukrainians are now taking shots at monuments to that literature.

I’ve pointed out (here and here) that Russia has long exploited the fact that some world-class Ukrainian authors have chosen to write in Russian, thereby affirming (in Russian eyes) that Ukrainians are really Russians—and that therefore Russian interference in Ukraine is justified.

There have Ukrainian authors, on the other hand, who have chosen to write in Ukrainian, thereby legitimating both the language and the nation that speaks it. If Ukrainians honor the poet Shevchenko, including with a large statue that overlooks Karkhiv’s city center, it’s because they say that, through his Ukrainian language poetry, he dreamed the nation into existence.

So welcome to the battle of memorials.

A Washington Post article notes some of the Russian memorials, including one in a city now known world-wide as the site of horrific Russian war crimes against the civilian population:

Reminders of Russian and Soviet dominion can be found almost everywhere in Ukraine. A street in Bucha is named after Alexander Pushkin, a poet revered by Russians as their Shakespeare. The 19th-century novelist Nikolai Gogol — who was born in Ukraine but claimed by Russia as one of its greatest authors because he wrote in Russian — overlooks one of Dnipro’s main boulevards from a pedestal. 

As I noted in a recent post, Gogol’s decision to write in Russian was a big deal for Russian émigré Vladimir Nabokov, showing the nature of Russian literary chauvinism. Here’s from an article that appeared in Literary Hub:

“We must thank fate (and the author’s thirst for universal fame) for his not having turned to the Ukrainian dialect as a medium of expression, because then all would have been lost,” wrote Vladimir Nabokov in his 1959 study, Gogol. He continued: “When I want a good nightmare, I imagine Gogol penning in Little Russian dialect volume after volume….” What he calls the “Little Russian dialect” is none other than the Ukrainian language, which is about as close to Russian as Spanish is to Italian.

I’ve also written on a Josef Brodsky poem that, part satirically but maybe not entirely, contrasts the “bullshitter” Shevchenko with the immortal Pushkin.

And then there is Bulgakov, author of The Master and Margarita and The Heart of a Dog, who though born in Kyiv chose to write in Russian. Not only that, the Post reports, but “he maligned Ukraine’s national aspirations and had the gall to disparage its mother tongue.”

So now Ukrainians are looking at what to do with the various memorials. According to the Post article, there is a new social media tool called “What did Pushkin do to you?” One types in a name and gets mini-tutorials on why various Russian figures should stay or go:

Tap Puskhin’s name, and the Telegram bot spits out a verdict writing him off as a “Russian chauvinist” who glorified czarist imperialism. It says much the same about Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Apparently the tool grants passes to Tolstoy and Chekhov “because of their humane and empathetic approach to almost everything they wrote.”

According to Yaroslav Hrytsak, director of the Institute for Historical Studies of Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Russian and Soviet markers have functioned as “a kind of imperial wallpaper” in Ukraine:

“I accepted it as a dull Soviet landscape,” Hrytsak said. It was as if street by street and square by square, the Soviet Union had all but lobotomized historical memory in Ukraine and other former republics, he said.

“Ukrainians were denied any kind of memory that would make them different from Russians,” Hrytsak said. “The politics of the Soviet Union toward Ukraine was a total amnesia.”

So if Pushkin and Gogol come down, who will take their place. One possibility mentioned in the article is Vasyl Semenovych Stus, a poet who died in a Soviet gulag while on a hunger strike in 1985. I did some googling on Stus and found a fascinating piece on him in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Here’s some material about him:

Following his arrest for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda” in 1972, Stus spent nine months in custody awaiting his trial. During this period he composed a major collection, Time of Creativity (later to become part of Palimpsests), the title of which communicates the choice he had made: to keep creating against all odds. In almost complete solitude, broken only by interrogations, Stus wrote more than 300 original poems and translated more than 100 poems by Goethe. The dates under Stus’s poems show that he sought to write at least one poem a day; some days he wrote as many as five.

And then there’s this:

The Jewish-Ukrainian dissident Semen Gluzman, then a young psychiatrist and now the head of Ukraine’s Association of Psychiatrists, spent 20 days with Stus in custody. On first entering the cell, he saw a 30-year-old man bent over a bedside table with a book of poetry and an open dictionary. In the “feast of conversations” that followed, Stus would speak at length about philosophy and literature, recite poetry from memory, and read out his translations of Rainer Maria Rilke. The cell Gluzman shared with Stus came to seem spacious and full of light, because the poet refused to allow it to suffocate their minds. “Over these prison walls, over this sorrow, / and over Sophia’s bell tower my spirit lifts me,” he wrote while imprisoned in the KGB building located jarringly close to the ancient Saint Sophia’s Cathedral in Kyiv. In another poem from this period he extends his spiritual flight, transcending the earthly realm altogether:

Earth is too small
for the spirit. Too cramped
for the dishevelled soul is this planet,
where dwelling is but hunching (the trenches
of self-elevations)

Where did Stus find the strength for this flight? The answer lies in one of his neologisms: samosoboiunapovnennia, “filling-oneself-with-oneself.” Stus uses the word in the very first poem he wrote in captivity, which starts with a star shining at dawn and ends with an epiphany: “for living means not overcoming limits / but adjusting and filling-oneself-with-oneself.”

I’m not saying that Stus is as great as Gogol—but Ukrainians undoubtedly are inspired by how he faces up to adversity, of which they are getting more than their share at the moment. And just because Shevchenko is not as great as Pushkin doesn’t mean that he can’t be more meaningful. After all, if Russians have used Pushkin as a cultural club, then they have already drained him of his poetry.

There may come a time, when Ukraine is free of the invaders and has reestablished itself as a multi-lingual republic, where Ukrainians will find their way back to Russian-language literature. But right now what they need are poets who speak to them in Ukrainian with a Ukrainian desire for freedom.

Further note: I see fro Stus’s Wikipedia page that there are, in fact, many Ukrainian streets named after him. No surprise there. And those street names, it appears, will be there to stay.

And to emphasize just how important such street naming is–and how Russians desecrate Pushkin and others when they use them to support imperial ambitions–here’s a report from Julia Davis, who monitors Russian television:

More genocidal talk on Russian state TV: falsely claiming that Ukrainians are just Russians who need to be reminded that the Ukrainian language, history and religion are “made up,” that Russian troops in Ukraine are fighting for “their land” and Russia is planning to never leave.

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Austen on the Simple Country Life

By Robin Bates | Published: May 22, 2022
Thomas Gainsborough, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1749)

Monday

We’re in full strawberry season at the moment, and the strawberry coffee cake that my wife made for yesterday’s church coffee hour—with strawberries she picked from the college farm—disappeared in an instant. Thoughts of literary strawberries took me to Jane Austen’s Emma, although when I first looked at the strawberry picking scene, I was confused. It shows up in a long paragraph that opens in one vein and ends in another. Something seems amiss.

I have learned to always trust Austen, however. If a sentence seems awkward, there is always—and I mean always—a reason for it. And so it has proved to be the case here.

Mrs. Elton, Emma’s social-climbing foil, has wheedled an invitation out of Mr. Knightley to invite people over to pick strawberries from his premier beds. Being a gentleman, Knightley can’t refuse, although he insists on doing it on his terms. Despite Mrs. Elton’s suggestion, there will be no outdoor picnic. They will pick strawberries and then go indoors for a luncheon.

Austen is taking a dig at idyllic views of nature here. Mrs. Elton has visions of a pastoral setting, with herself carrying around a basket with pink ribbons, riding in on a picturesque donkey, and, Marie-Antoinette like, playing the dairymaid—or in this case, the strawberry picker. Austen is always suspicious of such shallow Romanticism. .

In any event, Mrs. Elton at least gets a Donwell Abbey invitation and comes prepared to lord it over everyone.

And Emma? She’s looking forward to seeing Donwell again. Her sister has married Knightley’s brother, and her long friendship with Knightley makes her proud to have such an acquaintance. Upon arriving, she takes a tour of the grounds.

The paragraph that confused me begins with her reflections and ends with an account of the strawberry picking, conveyed entirely through snippets of Mrs. Elton’s non-stop comments. Here the paragraph, along with the lead in:

It was so long since Emma had been at the Abbey, that as soon as she was satisfied of her father’s comfort, she was glad to leave him, and look around her; eager to refresh and correct her memory with more particular observation, more exact understanding of a house and grounds which must ever be so interesting to her and all her family.

She felt all the honest pride and complacency which her alliance with the present and future proprietor could fairly warrant, as she viewed the respectable size and style of the building, its suitable, becoming, characteristic situation, low and sheltered—its ample gardens stretching down to meadows washed by a stream, of which the Abbey, with all the old neglect of prospect, had scarcely a sight—and its abundance of timber in rows and avenues, which neither fashion nor extravagance had rooted up.—The house was larger than Hartfield, and totally unlike it, covering a good deal of ground, rambling and irregular, with many comfortable, and one or two handsome rooms.—It was just what it ought to be, and it looked what it was—and Emma felt an increasing respect for it, as the residence of a family of such true gentility, untainted in blood and understanding.—Some faults of temper John Knightley had; but Isabella had connected herself unexceptionably. She had given them neither men, nor names, nor places, that could raise a blush. These were pleasant feelings, and she walked about and indulged them till it was necessary to do as the others did, and collect round the strawberry-beds.—The whole party were assembled, excepting Frank Churchill, who was expected every moment from Richmond; and Mrs. Elton, in all her apparatus of happiness, her large bonnet and her basket, was very ready to lead the way in gathering, accepting, or talking—strawberries, and only strawberries, could now be thought or spoken of.—“The best fruit in England—every body’s favorite—always wholesome.—These the finest beds and finest sorts.—Delightful to gather for one’s self—the only way of really enjoying them.—Morning decidedly the best time—never tired—every sort good—hautboy infinitely superior—no comparison—the others hardly eatable—hautboys very scarce—Chili preferred—white wood finest flavour of all—price of strawberries in London—abundance about Bristol—Maple Grove—cultivation—beds when to be renewed—gardeners thinking exactly different—no general rule—gardeners never to be put out of their way—delicious fruit—only too rich to be eaten much of—inferior to cherries—currants more refreshing—only objection to gathering strawberries the stooping—glaring sun—tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”

I fully expect the paragraph to end at the point where Emma joins the party, but it continues on. I think it does so because Austen wants the two halves to clash with each other. In the first half, the sentences are ordered and sedate. The abbey and its grounds reflect the good taste of its owner.

Mrs. Elton is an entirely different matter. She begins with inane small talk but, because she can never talk about something without making demeaning comparisons, she very soon launches into talking about different kinds of strawberries and which are superior—hautboys, Chilean strawberries, or white wood strawberries. Somehow her monologue gets around, as it always does, to her hometown of Maple Grove. Then, next thing we know, she’s putting down strawberries in favor of cherries, which then give way to currants. Then she’s complaining about stooping and the heat—so much for idyllic nature—and by the end she is “tired to death—could bear it no longer—must go and sit in the shade.”

So what’s Austen up to? As a vulgar social climber in the presence of gentry (Knightley, Emma), Mrs. Elton is the worm in the apple, the toad in the garden. Austen doesn’t say so directly, but Mrs. Elton’s strawberry monologue is just more proof that she lacks the class of her social superiors.

My favorite example of the contrast, which is a constant theme in the novel, appears in the final paragraph when Mrs. Elton lets us know what she thinks of Emma’s wedding dress—which she knows about because her husband performs the ceremony:

The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no taste for finery or parade; and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own.—“Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business!

We can imagine that her own wedding was gaudy and tasteless in the extreme.

Note how Austen carves up Mrs. Elton by showing, not telling. Years ago I remember reading an article discussing Austen’s indirect style. The author, whose name I can’t remember, noted that Gustave Flaubert is often given credit for indirect style in Madame Bovary, which appeared in 1856. Emma appeared in 1815, over 40 years earlier, and the article’s point was that she should be given more credit as a revolutionary stylist. After all, most authors of the time—including Austen in earlier novels and even occasionally in Emma—intervene in their novels. In any event, Austen is breaking new stylistic ground here.

I have to say that Austen’s distaste for social climbers, which shows up in most of her novels, is my least favorite thing about her. Think Isabella Thorpe, Lucy Steele, Caroline Bingley, Mrs. Elton, and Mrs. Clay. (Only Mansfield Park, with its focus on the young, rich, and restless, seems to lack a social climber.) Austen’s distaste, I think, comes from her anxiety about her own class status, which was perilously close to middle class. But putting that aside, she certainly knows how to wield her satiric pen when creating such figures.

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I Am the Blossom Pressed in the Book

By Robin Bates | Published: May 21, 2022

Spiritual Sunday

For today’s poem I share Jane Kenyon’s “Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks.” In the poem, she alludes to Julian of Norwich’s revelations, which sent me back to the medieval mystic’s Revelations of Divine Love.

In 1373 Julian, who appeared to be on her deathbed (she had already received extreme unction) had a series of 15 revelations (or shewings) of Jesus and a 16th on the following night. She spent the rest of her life exploring those revelations. Here’s a sampling:

And in the same Shewing suddenly the Trinity fulfilled my heart most of joy. And so I understood it shall be in heaven without end to all that shall come there. For the Trinity is God: God is the Trinity; the Trinity is our Maker and Keeper, the Trinity is our everlasting love and everlasting joy and bliss, by our Lord Jesus Christ. And this was shewed in the First [Shewing] and in all: for where Jesus appeareth, the blessed Trinity is understood, as to my sight.

In her poem, Kenyon appears to capture moments, brief but intense, that speak to her of spirit. Each has its own resonance and each will hit you differently. The love, however, is always there. 

It will overwhelm you when you think to call its name.

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
By Jane Kenyon

I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years. . . .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper….

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me. . . .
I am food on the prisoner’s plate. . . .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills. . . .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden. . . .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge. . . .

I am the heart contracted by joy. . . .
the longest hair, white
before the rest. . . .

I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow. . . .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit. . . .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name. . . .

Further thought: I can’t believe that I didn’t mention Julian’s hazelnut, which is the real inspiration for this poem. All the items that Kenyon mentions in her poem are her versions of that hazelnut. Here’s the passage:

And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made.’ I marveled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and ever shall, for God loves it. And so have all things their beginning by the love of God.

In this little thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it. The second that God loves it. And the third, that God keeps it.”

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Literary Tweeting

By Robin Bates | Published: May 19, 2022
Franz Snyders, Concert of Birds (1601)

Friday

From time to time, I share literary tweets composed by my son Tobias Wilson-Bates (@PhDhurtBrain), who is in the Georgia Gwinnett College English Department. I sometimes joke that I rebelled against my father by specializing in British rather than French literature while Toby rebelled against me by specializing in 19th century British literature whereas I specialized in 18th century British literature. In any event, Toby has far surpassed his father in his mastery of the twitter format, composing hundreds of insightful and often very funny tweets. My favorites, of course, are those that deal with literature, and I share some of my recent favorites today. (You can read previous posts on Toby’s tweets here and here.)

Samuel Johnson, an inveterate procrastinator, once said that procrastination can take the form of intense busyness. Here’s Toby’s tweet on the subject:

Sherlock Holmes (*entering my house): a very clean home
Me: thanks!
Holmes: avoiding work deadlines I presume?
Me: YOU BASTARD!

On creative writing, in two tweets:

Dickens skewers Chancery Court in Bleak House, but if you think about it, as a young court reporter Dickens probably drew an enormous amount of insight into plot and character watching hundreds of hours of depositions.

What I’m saying is that MFA programs should offer a class that’s just sitting in on local court cases for a semester.

Dickens gets a lot of play in Toby’s tweets. Here are some more instances:

Every single other Dickens title makes more sense than Our Mutual Friend.

From now on just assigning the first two serial fragments of novels and then telling students they need to register for my classes next semester to get the rest.

Dickens writing from female perspective: she’s so mysterious! her manners are a carefully orchestrated symphony of etiquette.
Bronte writing from a male perspective: this asshole is so insufferably full of shit you would not believe it.

Here he summarizes T.S. Eliot:

The Work of TS Eliot: or, how to be unhappy but in a useless way

Toby started a twitter thread on literary figures and characters who complain a lot:

the popularity of complaining about how other people are complaining makes me think we’re still in the fin de siècle somehow

Matthew Arnold was the all-time king of “my complaining is better than your complaining”

Pater was just telling everyone to complain harder

Picture of Dorian Gray is 90% just people complaining and then some quick murders to finish up

to be fair, Hamlet is also mostly just one guy complaining about things

I was touched that Toby in one series of tweets mentioned my inspiration for his name. It’s about Tristram Shandy’s gentle Uncle Toby refusing to hurt even a fly:

Tristram Shandy has arguably the best line in English literature: “Go, says he, lifting up the sash, and opening his hand as he spoke, to let it escape;—go poor devil, get thee gone, why should I hurt thee?—This world surely is wide enough to hold both thee and me.”

Really every scene with Uncle Toby is solid gold.

And, yes, I was named after this specific character, so what?

Uncle Toby, having sustained a wound to his groin in the Battle of Namur, becomes obsessed with recreating the fortifications where it happened. I like Toby’s comparison:

building a full scale model of the singular moment of your trauma is basically what writing an academic monograph is

And then there’s the widow who has her eyes on innocent Uncle Toby but who first wants to find out—without asking directly, of course—whether his war wound has incapacitated him:

I will never stop laughing at the “I can show you just the spot where I was wounded!” widow scene. The most perfect punchline in literature.

Toby gets some good laughs out of the anti-technology Luddites (who hated what factories were doing to working men and women) and Lord Byron, who from his elite position claimed to be a rebel:

Luddites: we need a few clear political mandates to convince parliament our cause is just!
Byron: good! and then we’ll seduce their wives and beautiful half sisters!!
Luddites: ok, ok, who let Byron into the meeting???

The following two tweets were composed in the final week of the semester when Toby was madly grading student essays:

Testing out a new hypothesis that the work will eventually give up and complete itself. More later.

*David Attenborough voice: the Work continues to rest lazily in its natural habitat, but don’t let its relaxed demeanor lull you, it is capable of doubling or tripling at a moment’s notice.

Since Toby handles twitter so beautifully, he of course has been interested in Elon Musk’s on-again, off-again attempt to acquire the company:

For all you Bleak House lovers, if the Twitter sale goes sideways the whole thing is ending up in Chancery, well known for handling complicated cases quickly 😉😉😉

 Toby’s dissertation was on how notions of time changed over the course of the 19th century, influencing literature in the process. As a result, meditations on time often show up in his tweets, as here:

Rime of the Ancient Mariner is actually a poem about what it feels like to go to one of those Time Share pitches.

Also, aren’t we all already Sharing Time??? Deeply troubling to consider the alternative 🤔

 And here:

My proudest teaching moment is probably still teaching Alice in Wonderland in a class on temporality, where I sent the whole class off on a journey across campus and when they came back we sat there for a second and then a student said, “that was a waste of Time, wasn’t it?”

I almost fell out of my seat cheering. Credit hours are already a nonsense structure.

On James Joyce:

Editor: (*laughing) no, but for real, if we publish this the way it is right now, you’re gonna sound like a real pervert

James Joyce: *looks directly into the camera

 On Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is like 4 entirely different books in one, but the surrealist horror of a single human footprint is the best one.

 For those Thomas Gray fans:

WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THAT THOMAS GRAY WAS BURIED IN A HUMBLE COUNTRY CHURCHYARD?!

Thomas Gray: I AM the mute inglorious Milton I want to see in the world.

For John Steinbeck fans:

Grapes of Wrath was the original Squid Games.

Steinbeck and [George] Eliot both feel like they do this thing where the plotting, in almost the gentlest way, leads you to the cruelest outcome

A note to his almost 4500 twitter followers:

Greetings, new Followers! Just know that by Following me, you implicitly endorse Middlemarch as better than Moby Dick and that the 19th century extends from 1780-1914. I don’t make the rules (except for this rule that I just made up)

A response to a tweet by one Jack Corbett:

Jack Corbett: Enough content creators, now time for content destroyers.

Toby: Alexander Pope’s entire career in a tweet

On William Morris:

Last time I taught News from Nowhere, I feel like I didn’t do it justice, but this time the students are so into it that the artisanal revolution might happen after class gets out.

On selling one’s soul:

Mephistopheles: I will offer you anythi-
Me: a sabbatical.
Mephistopheles: I mean, you could have infinit-
*sound of door slamming, tires squeal into the distance

On teaching literature:

just reiterating that it’s a crime against me that I can’t assign 16 novels for one semester in an undergraduate English class. incredibly difficult choosing only a couple to teach!

Response to a game invented by (I think) one Dustin Friedman:

Ok. I’ll play.
Victorian authors edition
Favorite of all time: George Eliot
Dislike: Carlyle. The answer is Carlyle.
Grew on me: Wilkie Collins (brought sexy back)
Most overrated: this feels like a trick
Most underrated: Richard Marsh
The G.O.A.T.: Wilde & Eliot tie

And finally, a twitter thread about combining 19th century novels:

all film adaptations should retroactively produce extended universe structures. fairly clear that Lucy Snow [from Villette] tracks down Wickham in order to resolve that situation for Elizabeth Bennet, and then tells Darcy not to say a word.

Jane Eyre’s rich uncle mysteriously dying at a convenient time is the work of Van Helsing.

Thornton [in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South] goes bankrupt because the wildly profitable speculation in America is investing in Magwitch’s sheep fortune.

Basil leaves Miss Havisham at the altar, so it’s kind of not too bad when Dorian kills him.

Heathcliff turns out to be the love child of the Monster and Elizabeth Lavenza [Dr. Frankenstein’s wife]

this also makes the scene where he tries to dig up Catherine’s grave make a new kind of sense

After Frankenstein dies, Walton goes on to become the Ancient Mariner.

All I’m saying is that comic nerds have had their decade in the sun. RELEASE THE LITERATURE NERDS!

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All Authoritarians Are Like Richard III

By Robin Bates | Published: May 18, 2022
Hogarth, Richard Garrick as Richard III

Thursday

A twitter thread by one Scott Monty, who writes regularly about leadership issues, has sent me back to Stephen Greenblatt’s very insightful Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, which shows us how well Shakespeare understood the authoritarian mindset. Monty finds a number of connections between New York University historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s work on Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present and (thanks to Greenblatt) Shakespeare’s Richard III as he analyzes figures like Jair Bolsonaro, Rodrigo Duterte, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Trump wannabe Ron DeSantis.

According to Ben-Ghiat, all authoritarian figures are driven by the urge to control. And yet even as they proclaim “law and order rule,” they enable lawlessness. This paradox, she notes, means that their government invariably “evolves into a criminal enterprise.”

They also lack all empathy, and Monty quotes Richard III’s admission, “Tear-falling pity dwells not in this eye.” Monty notes that, for his part, Mussolini said the secret to his success was to “Keep your heart a desert.”

A particularly interesting observation (this from Ben-Ghiat) is that strongmen, while they may be “genius strategists,” seldom have a master plan for their rule. This has certainly been true of Donald Trump and it’s true of Richard III as well. As I read the following passage from Greenblatt’s Tyrant, I think of Trump’s look of stunned disbelief on election night 2016 that he has just been elected president:

But once Richard reaches his lifelong goal–at the end of the third act of Shakespeare’s play–the laughter quickly begins to curdle. Much of the pleasure of his winning derived from its wild improbability. Now the prospect of endless winning proves to be a grotesque delusion. Though he has seemed a miracle of dark efficiency, Richard is quite unprepared to unite and run a whole country.

The people that Richard proceeds to bring into his administration are not unlike those Trump brought into his own. Loyalty trumps competence, as Greenblatt notes:

The tyrant’s triumph is based on lies and fraudulent promises braided around the violent elimination of rivals. The cunning strategy that brings him to the throne hardly constitutes a vision for the realm; nor has he assembled counselors who can help him formulate one. He can count–for the moment, at least–on the acquiescence of such suggestible officials as the London mayor and frightened clerks like the scribe. But the new ruler possesses neither administrative ability nor diplomatic skill, and no one in his entourage can supply what he manifestly lacks. …Cynical operators like Catesby and Ratcliffe are hardly suited to be statesmen. Though higher in social station, they differ little from the hoodlums Richard hires to do his bidding.

Richard does manage to bring in some competent administrators, especially Lord Stanley. But Stanley, like some of Trump’s more responsible Cabinet picks early in his administration, ultimately finds himself looking for a way out:

Lord Stanley cuts a more plausible figure as a prudent adviser–and the play depicts him reluctantly conveying the king’s wishes–but, as his early nightmare suggests, he has long been afraid of “the boar” and can hardly be expected to serve as a linchpin of the upstart regime. Secretly he is already in contact with the regime’s mortal enemies.

Richard’s one reliable ally is the Duke of Buckingham, who has helped Richard ascend to power, and I particularly like Greenblatt’s discussion of how Richard tries to persuade Buckingham to kill Richard’s two nephews. Their father Edward IV having died, the princes are next in line to the throne and therefore stand in Richard’s way. Like Donald Trump, Richard wants a subordinate to do something dirty without explicitly telling him to do so, thereby retaining plausible deniability. Buckingham, however, forces him to spell it out:

Though he has carefully sent everyone else out of earshot, Richard is at first somewhat coy about what he wants. “Young Edward lives,” he notes, referring to the late king’s heir, who is being held along with his brother in the Tower; “think now what I would speak.” But Buckingham steadfastly refuses to play the guessing game, whose meaning is not difficult to divine. Richard, increasingly vexed, is forced to make his meaning clear.

O bitter consequence,
That Edward still should live! ‘True, noble prince!’
Cousin, thou wert not wont to be so dull:
Shall I be plain? I wish the bastards dead;
And I would have it suddenly perform’d.

Greenblatt’s point is that Richard needs accomplices in his crimes, just as Trump has sought accomplices to overturn the election. Sometimes Trump has been as straightforward as Richard’s “I wish the bastards dead”: for instance, he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him “11,000 votes.” More frequently, however, he has expected others to make the demands, in part to keep his fingerprints off of illegal activities, in part to assure himself of his subordinates’ loyalty. It’s such loyalty that Richard wants as well:

At this critical moment at the onset of his reign, he wants and needs to be assured of his associate’s loyalty, and that loyalty is best guaranteed by having Buckingham make himself an accomplice to a horrendous crime. Though it would have been still better if Buckingham had suggested on his own that the children be killed–hence Richard’s initial coyness–the associate’s simple “consent” will serve as a sufficient guarantee.

This desperate need for loyal accomplices shows how isolated Richard (like Trump) feels:

For the tyrant, there is remarkably little satisfaction….Whatever pleasures he might have imagined would be his give way to frustration, anger, and gnawing fear. Moreover, the possession of power is never secure. There is always something else that must be done in order to reinforce his position, and since he has reached his goal through criminal acts, what is required inevitably are further criminal acts. The tyrant is obsessed with loyalty from his inner circle, but he can never be entirely confident that he has it. The only people who will serve him are self-interested scoundrels, like himself; in any case, he is not interested in honest loyalty or dispassionate, independent judgment. Instead he wants flattery, confirmation, and obedience.

When the tyrant senses that previously loyal followers are having second thoughts—Buckingham for Richard, Attorney General Bill Barr and Vice President Mike Pence for Trump—the tyrant lashes out. Previous service means nothing:

Buckingham, he reflects, “grows circumspect” and circumspection is potentially dangerous….And when his old ally …repeatedly asks for the reward that he had been promised for his many services, Richard peremptorily dismissed him: “Thou troublest me, I am not in the vein.” Having participated in the entrapment and betrayal of so many others, Buckingham is able to read the ominous signs very clearly and decides to flee for his life. His effort is in vain; he will eventually be caught and executed.

The day that Trump no longer has the ability to influence political events will be the day that he finds himself alone, like Richard, on Bosworth Field. Never have been loyal to anyone else himself, he will find himself repaid in kind.  “A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!” Richard famously cries out before Richmond—the man who will replace him on the throne as Henry VII—cuts him down.

No one mourns him.

Clarification: Reader Carole Williams wrote in noting that it’s important to distinguish between Shakespeare’s Richard III and the actual Richard III:

I am assuming you are talking about the main character in  Shakespeare’s play Richard the Third, as there has long been a Richard III society here for the real man. This play was  written for Tudor monarch whose forebear Henry VII seized the throne, and had to have an excuse for doing so. But as a character in a play, this fictional king serves your argument well. 


I read British author of hundred years ago, Josephine Tey: The  Daughter of  Time when I was  17 and although her argument is more basic than more recent works, it is  highly readable and based on what was known then. Did you see the excitement when his body was found in Leicester a few years ago?

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This Time Grendel Chose Buffalo

By Robin Bates | Published: May 17, 2022

Wednesday

In the wake of the horrific race killings in Buffalo, I am simply updating a past post because I can’t think of anything new to say. When I launched this blog 13 years ago, I called it Better Living through Beowulf because Beowulf is the starting text for those of us specializing in British Literature. I used Beowulf to represent all of literature and felt free to write about any literary work that provides insight into the life we are living.

While highlighting Beowulf, I didn’t realize how relevant it would prove to be in an America grappling with unending racial hatred, a hatred that is stoked by various media figures and online fascist groups and rendered lethal by easy access to guns. In my opinion, no literary work understands violent eruptions better than Beowulf, making it an essential resource for our time.

At the end of this article you can see how often I have turned to Beowulf when writing about mass killings. My book, How Beowulf Can Save America, also explores America’s anger problem, although I am less optimistic than I was in 2012, when I wrote it.

Beowulf is above all a poem about violence—what causes it, the chaos that ensues, and what can be done to counter it. Given the instability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society, the Beowulf poet was well acquainted with the subject. While some of the violence he mentions comes from abroad (Frank, Frisian, and Swedish invasions), he is most interested in the violence that comes from within. Essentially,  he focuses on domestic rather than foreign terrorism.

The poem’s three monsters, each of which is the manifestation of a different kind of anger, are all locally generated. This is noteworthy because the poem opens with images of political stability. There has been a successful four-king succession (no small thing), and the fourth king has built a magnificent mead hall designed to make any foreign invader think twice. It’s like America flexing its military might. Because Hrothgar’s Denmark and the United States are both the reigning superpowers of their time, neither fears a frontal attack.

Yet violence still occurs and in this very mead hall. Grendel is no more a foreigner than those white supremacists who dwell in the dark reaches of the internet, nursing a “hard grievance” and resenting the sounds of other people having a good time—say, liberals celebrating the richness of a diverse nation. Our own Grendels attack our shopping malls, schools, churches, synagogues, hair salons, and—this past Saturday—our grocery stores, intent on ripping us apart.

Grendel is the form grievance takes when it turns to violence. He is society’s malcontent, which in Anglo-Saxon society could take the form of a warrior angry about being bypassed, a nephew who thinks he should be king, or a relative of a diplomatic marriage who can’t get over the quarrel the marriage was supposed to solve. All three figures show up in the non-monster parts of the poem, but their fury receives full emotional articulation in the archetype of the monster.

Grendel’s mode of attack resembles any number of the shooters we have seen, including the Buffalo shooter: they storm into a space and begin shooting (in Grendel’s case, slashing) left and right. The fury of slaughter overtakes them until some strong arm takes them down. Here’s Grendel anticipating the carnage to come:

Then his rage boiled over, he ripped open
the mouth of the building, maddening for blood,
pacing the length of the patterned floor
with his loathsome tread, while a baleful light,
flame more than light, flared from his eyes.
He saw many men in the mansion, sleeping,
a ranked company of kinsmen and warriors
quartered together. And his glee was demonic,
picturing the mayhem: before morning
he would rip life from limb and devour them,
feed on their flesh…

The strong arm, by the way, is not “a good guy with a gun.” The NRA’s macho stance—which is actually a sales pitch for buying more guns and is more accurately translated as “a white guy with a gun”—grows out of the very resentment that leads to the violence we are witnessing. When Beowulf enters Hrothgar’s hall, he is affronted by a trash-talking Unferth, who has killed a relative but is still accorded a place of honor. Instead of reaching for his sword, Beowulf makes a strong verbal reply that gets Unferth to back down. It’s a version of how he defeats Grendel: he disarms both figures–literally in Grendel’s case–with a strong grip, which proves more effective than the frantic sword strokes dealt out by his fellow warriors.

We cannot rely on a Beowulf to ride in and save us, although it would make some difference if Republicans and Fox News forcefully renounced white supremacy. Bullies sometimes back down when so confronted.

But because GOP lawmakers cower before Grendel’s destructive energy, the shooters in our midst are emboldened and unleash mayhem in our great hall. As a result, we find ourselves in the position of Hrothgar: head in his hands following a second monster attack, he moans, “Rest, what is rest? Sorrow has returned.”

Former Republicans like David Jolly, Joe Scarborough, Nicole Wallace, Max Boot, David Frum, Bill Kristol, Joe Walsh, Michael Steele, and many others have acknowledged that the GOP will never approve common sense gun reform, never stop catering to racist replacement fears, never stand up to Trump and his big lie that he won the election. Their solution is for voters to vote out all Republicans. Only by feeling the strong grip of electoral pressure, they believe, will the Party return to its senses.

It’s hard to see many Republicans taking their advice, unfortunately. As Grendel could tell you, perpetual rage and resentment is a potent drug.

Previous Posts on Mass Killings

Racism, Traveler of Darkness
Mass Killings, Our Most Dangerous Game
What Would Lord Jim Do?
On Labeling Survivors as Crisis Actors
In Support of Today’s NRA Marchers
Manchester: Grendel Evil vs. Beowulf’s Strength of Mind
Sen. Blackburn Unsexes Herself over Guns
NRA Uber Alles
GOP Invokes Catch-22 on Gun Control
Atwood’s Dystopias and the Gun Business
Conrad: Terrorism Not as Clear as It Looks
The Killer Always Comes Back
Las Vegas: Our Killers, Ourselves
Grendel Strikes in Orlando
This Time Grendel Chose Umpqua
Grendel Violence Never Ends 
Grendel in Paris
Pennywise Kills North Carolina Muslims
The Killer Always Comes Back
Grendel as a Norwegian Christian Fascist
Dostoevsky and the Arizona Shootings 
Lost Paradise Syndrome in Tucson
Analyzing Loughner’s Booklist
Satan Strikes Again, This Time in Aurora
Grendel’s Invasion of Fort Hood
A Modern Grendel on the Rampage

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Imagine Hemingway in Ukraine

By Robin Bates | Published: May 16, 2022
Bergman and Cooper in For Whom the Bell Tolls

Tuesday

When the colorful Malcolm Nance, former Navy officer and counterintelligence specialist,  joined the international fighters that have journeyed to Ukraine to fight the Russians, I figured the time had finally come for me to read Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Hemingway famously reported on a similar international group of volunteer fighters–the international Lincoln Brigade—that traveled to Spain in the late 1930s to battle Franco’s fascists. While he didn’t fight, Hemingway described what was happening and also raised money and helped produce The Spanish Earth in support of the Republican cause.

For his part, Nance, at age 60, has stepped away from his career of sought-after commentator and book author to risk his life in another country fighting to hold on to its republic. “The more I saw of the war going on, the more I thought, I’m done talking, it’s time to take action,” Nance told MSNBC’s Joy Reid.

As I read the book, I am struck by how much more important Robert Jordan’s mission appears in light of Ukraine. Jordan, an American engineer, has been sent into the mountains to blow up a bridge. The timing must be right—after Republican troops have used it for their attack and before the fascists can use it in the expected counterattack. An early passage in the book lined up eerily with a remarkable battle at the Siverskyi Donets River, where the Ukrainians took out 73 Russian vehicles and somewhere between 250 and 1000 Russian soldiers as they tried to cross over on a pontoon bridge. 

Reading the twitter thread of someone who identifies as “Maxim,” a Ukrainian EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) officer, is like reading Hemingway’s novel. To show you what I mean, I’m putting them side by side. First, some tweets from Maxim, as reported in the Military Times. The quotation marks indicate the tweets:

 “I explored the area and suggested a location where Russians might attempt to mount a pontone bridge to get to the other side.” 

“Artillery was ready. We have been able to confirm Russians mounted 7 parts of the bridge out of 8. Russians have even succeeded to move some troops and vehicles over the river. Combats started.”

About 20 minutes after a recon unit confirmed the Russian bridge was being mounted, “HEAVY ARTILLERY engaged against Russian forces, and then aviation chipped in as well. I was still in the area, and I have never seen / heard such heavy combat in my life.”

“Some Russian forces (~30-50 vehicles + infantry) were stuck on Ukrainian side of the river with no way back. They tried to run away using broken bridge. Then they tried to arrange a new bridge.”

Ukrainian aviation then started a heavy bombardment of the area, “and it destroyed all the remains of Russians there, and other bridge they tried to make.”

By May 10, the pontoon bridge was gone.

“Their strategic objective was to cross the river and then encircle Lysychansk. They miserably failed.”

And here’s Hemingway, although the passage I’ve chosen is not about the bridge Robert Jordan is supposed to destroy. Rather, it’s about an earlier explosion engineered by (ironically enough) a Russian operative. Jordan’s guide Anselmo describes what happens:

He shook his head remembering, then went on. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing as when the explosion was produced. The train was coming steadily. We saw it far away. And I had an excitement so great that I cannot tell it. We saw steam from it and then later came the noise of the whistle. Then it came chu-chu-chu-chu-chu-chu steadily larger and larger and then, at the moment of the explosion, the front wheels of the engine rose up and all of the earth seemed to rise in a great cloud of blackness and a roar and the engine rose high in the cloud of dirt and of the wooden ties rising in the air as in a dream and then it fell onto its side like a great wounded animal and there was an explosion of white steam before the clods of the other explosion had ceased to fall on us and the máquina [machine gun] commenced to speak ta-tat-tat-ta!” went the gypsy shaking his two clenched fists up and down in front of him, thumbs up, on an imaginary machine gun. “Ta! Ta! Tat! Tat! Tat! Ta!” he exulted. “Never in my life have I seen such a thing, with the troops running from the train and the máquina speaking into them and the men falling.

In what follows, it sounds like the Spanish fascists have some of the same reluctance to fight as Ukraine’s Russian invaders. If so many Russian generals have been killed, some theorize, it’s because morale issues have forced them to personally step forward, putting themselves within range of Ukrainian fire. In the Hemingway passage, Anselmo notes that the fascist commanding officer has to shoot a couple of his men to get them to advance. Unfortunately, he’s not as vulnerable to enemy fire as the Russian generals:

Later, after we had been down at the train to see what there was to take, an officer forced some troops back toward us at the point of a pistol. He kept waving the pistol and shouting at them and we were all shooting at him but no one hit him. Then some troops lay down and commenced firing and the officer walked up and down behind them with his pistol and still we could not hit him and the máquina could not fire on him because of the position of the train. This officer shot two men as they lay and still they would not get up and he was cursing them and finally they got up, one two and three at a time and came running toward us and the train. Then they lay flat again and fired. Then we left, with the máquina still speaking over us as we left. It was then I found the girl where she had run from the train to the rocks and she ran with us. It was those troops who hunted us until that night.”

If the two accounts sound so similar, it’s in part testimony to how well Hemingway listened to the fighters he interviewed.

One other note: My father, who was a soldier-interpreter in World War II, has a story about For Whom the Bell Tolls. He was a guard duty in Coventry, England on June 5, 1944 and, because all was quiet, he was reading Hemingway’s novel. He reports, however, looking up and suddenly seeing the entire sky filled with airplanes. It was the night before the D Day invasion, and bombers were setting off for France to pound German positions, thereby preparing the way for storming the Normandy beaches the following day.

Incidentally, as a member of the administrative forces, he would not himself land on the beaches until two weeks later.

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