The Beiderbecke Affair

Quick, Somebody Call Oprah!

Nicole Jackson worries about ethical lapses early in her writing career:

Keep in mind, this was also the year I won a personal-narrative contest for writing about a best friend who died in my arms Christmas Eve. My language-arts teacher had told us—I swear!—that personal narratives could be made up, even though they’re generally, um, not. Of course, my narrative was completely untrue and entirely inspired by Beaches, much to the chagrin of the contest runner-up, who’d written with brutal honesty about the time she accidentally ate rabbit poop.

Read more at Nicole’s new blog, Project X.

‘This was the backdrop to his dreams’

From All-School Chorus:

The thing that haunts me most about this painting is that it hung in my father’s room when he was a child. This was what greeted my toddler father in the mornings when he stood up in his crib in 1951. This was the backdrop to his play and his dreams before he was sent to boarding school at age eleven. I think of my father running most mornings through the dark woods at 5 AM, or only allowing himself two crumbling Fig Newtons for dessert, and I know where these impulses started.

IMAGE: Horses in Fog, Mt Charleston, Nevada

‘I’m dead. That sucks.’

From a posthumous blog post by Army Maj. Andrew Olmsted, who was killed in Iraq last week:

What I don’t want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I’ve enjoyed in my life. So if you’re up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980–1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can’t laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I’m dead, but if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

• Freedom Isn’t Free – Team America [Mp3]

Happy Halloween

And a sad goodnight to Giornale Nuovo, which provided this day-appropriate engraving, The Vision of Ezekiel (early 1500s) by Giorgio Ghisi.

'I began to preach my milleniums on the horn'

Sometimes the writing on Mp3 blogs, even the better ones, is just so, so bad.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful song, smally sung, its rhymes like so many red-brown berries in a briar bush. A prayer sung like a goodbye—And maybe to you, our readers, so often silent, this seems like a vapid thing to say. “A prayer sung like a goodbye”—what does it mean? what does it mean? What’s a song like a prayer sung like a goodbye? But what I hope is that, like me, you can lie there and know of what I speak. The way a thing that’s not a goodbye can sound like one; the way words, farewelled, go feisting past your ribs and sink into your heart.

Seriously? What?

Which is why I am so grateful for Moistworks, where Megan recently considered that “serial convert Mezz Mezzrow”:

Russian Jew by birth, he converted to black music at 15, which he discovered, of course, in prison. (It “hit me like a millennium would hit a philosopher,” said Mezz.) Black music was just a gateway drug. Under its pernicious influence Mezz converted to the demon weed and became a lifelong viper. Here’s how he describes the experience:

I began to feel very happy and sure of myself. With my loaded horn I could take all the fist-swinging, evil things in the world and bring them together in perfect harmony, spreading peace and joy and relaxation to all the keyed-up and punchy people everywhere. I began to preach my milleniums on the horn, leading all the sinners to glory.

In a rapidly accelerating spiral, Mezz left Chicago (having converted to New York) and moved to Harlem, where he converted to Negroism (see also Norman Mailer.) And that, of course, led him right back to prison, where he famously asked to be confined in the colored cell block. (“I don’t think I’d get along in the white blocks,” said Mezz.)

Mezz was one of the great characters of jazz.

PREVIOUSLY: “You can’t mix up the sweet talk and high-pressure fruiting with blowing jazz music out of your guts”; Mezz Mezzrow meets Mick Jagger; “Don’t fiddle with the Yiddle, or he’ll riddle you in the middle”

Quote of the Day

I can only try my best to summon Robert E. Lee, Elvis, and Jesus himself to form a floaty, ethere[a]l, spirit-like tribunal to judge those “neo-Yankees” for misleading the world on southern history. – Jim

Confront Slavery or Move On?

My well-read friend Rick responds, in an email, to the latest salvo from proud Southerner and neo-Yank-hypocrite-despiser Jim:

Again, I don’t understand what he’s so upset about. Southern culture has so much to its credit, but slavery is not part of it. Secession was a plan by the planter aristocracy to protect its property, i.e., human chattel. The lower-class culture of the South, be it white or black, had a lot of dynamism, but it was under the shackles of a system based on exploitation. A recent book by William A. Link, Roots of Secession (UNC Press), details the slave culture of Virginia during the 1850s. He states that Virginia had more slaves—half a million—and more slave holders—52,000—than any state in the South. He also cited 60,000 free blacks. He claims that those numbers created surplus labor. With cotton spreading west into Texas, the Virginia slave holders were able to get rid of surplus labor by exporting human property to areas where there were labor shortages, i.e. Mississippi and east Texas. Those sales brought profit to the Virginia slave holders.

Okay.

That was the state of slavery around the same time that Kansas went into Civil War thanks to Stephen Douglas’s neat little ploy. Lincoln believed by the end of the Civil War that the war had to be fought because the country needed to purge itself of its Great Sin. The sin was slavery, and it should have been dealt with by the guys who wrote the Constitution. Jefferson and Washington were against slavery—but they kept their slaves. Yeah, Northern states had slavery up until . . . I don’t know, the 1820s, I believe.

Your correspondent says we need to move forward. The South has a vibrant economy. Cities like Atlanta and Charlotte are becoming regional centers of a new and expanding culture. It does not behoove these areas, or places like South Carolina or Mississippi (centers of the Confederacy) to keep up the pretense that the Civil War was about states’ rights. I believe Strom Thurmond’s sorry career and sordid past, and Trent Lott’s pathetic tribute to old Strom as he doddered out of the Senate, shows that the representatives of those hotbeds of Confederate pride should move on and recognize that one of the aspects of the slave and post-slavery culture exploitation of a race of people, and the side effect of a production of mixed-race children such as the one Strom fathered.

Sorry these details are out their to soil Confederate pride, but as Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it was.”

IMAGE: Slaves waiting for Sale, Virginia (oil) by Eyre Crowe, 1861

My Name Is Paul, and This Is Between Y'all

Let’s leave wives out of it, shall we?

From the Reader Feedback Dept. (I Hate the CSA Edition)

This just in from, presumably, a proud Southerner:

I disagree with both your disrespect toward anything Confederate and your approval of the most insipid and biased Kevin Levin. Kevin has the same old tired neo-Yank hypocritical view of the South—he just takes longer to say it. Kevin can’t bring himself to celebrate the South without condemning Confederate memory and history. Kevin also cannot allow for differences of opinion. Lastly, Kevin refuses to look at racial issues such as slavery outside of the American South and for his shoddy lies, he deserves to be ridiculed.

Here is a Yale paper stating that, “every state in the continental United States with the exception of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont has had lynching casualties.”

Nothing like a little truth to put things into perspective.

Wow.

My Mistake

It was my mistake for considering, even for a second, that Ann Althouse was a credible source on the subjects of history, education, or literature (let alone the intersection of those three). A friend of mine directed me to an observation the law professor made in 2005 about novels:

And novels also contain plenty of foolish notions, tedious observations, phony depictions of human nature, and awful writing. I’m most interested in learning about things that are true and hearing great ideas, and I have never found novels to be a particularly rich source. Of course there are the emotion-stirring stories, but for that, there are so many movies to see, nearly all of which are fiction. But I find I don’t have much interest in stories—all those personal problems with relationships! Even for a film, I’d rather see a documentary.

I don’t have a problem with the opinion, just the assumption behind it: that she in fact knows anything, even the tiniest thing, about novels.