Four Books and a Battlefield

I finish watching that multi-episode historical film and watch a movie. I read newspaper comics. The requisite round of Roulette is played. I read three books and chip away at another.

For two weeks I went traveling to my home area of New Jersey and Philadelphia to visit friends and family. Reads and watches for this entry were spread across the several days before leaving California, time in Philly/Jerz and jaunts to Gettysburg and Manhattan.

Picture Pavane

The U.S. and the Holocaust, directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein, 2022. I wrote over the previous two entries about the first and second parts of this three-part film. I watched those episodes on a DVD I got from the public library. When I got to New Jersey I got around to watching the last episode on the PBS streamer at my parents’ condo.

Overall it’s a very finely-made, stirring, emotionally devastating and unsettlingly restrained examination of what the United States got right and wrong about trying to forestall the occurrence of and ameliorate the disastrous effects of the Holocaust. The last episode is a fitting conclusion and ends with a clip roll of modern-day bigots making anti-Semitic and xenophobic remarks and slurs which Burns and company convincingly suggest position them as the heirs to the Coughlins and Lindberghs of the bleak pre-War days.

It certainly would have been remarkable, had they finished this film a year later, to see if they would have included for example Kan/Ye’s disgusting recent Jew-hating outbursts and Dave Chappelle’s smirking crypto-anti-Semitic standup material. I can’t see that content quite fitting tonally in a Ken Burns production but I wonder what the filmmakers would have made of the opportunity if they’d had it.

Four Weddings and a Funeral, directed by Mike Newell, 1994. A brisk, charming, engaging, warm and funny romantic comedy with heart. The risible Love, Actually, which was written by the same writer and even shares some of the same music, is also thematically and stylistically downstream of Four Weddings and a Funeral: the two movies share a quirkily English sensibility, a central performance by Hugh Grant and a lightly experimental structure. Four Weddings and a Funeral is kinda like if Love, Actually had good photography and dialogue, a relatively plausible plot, a manageably-sized ensemble cast and stakes I actually gave a shit about.

Four Weddings and a Funeral concerns Grant’s character Charles, a goodhearted young bachelor who feels left out by the friends’ weddings he is compelled to attend, circling around a beautiful and beguiling American gal named Carrie played by Andie MacDowell whom he loves at first sight but can’t seem to fuck at the right time. The film is built around two weddings of friends of Charles and Carrie and one each for Charles and Carrie themselves, though cleverly, pointedly and satisfyingly not to one another. And as stated by the title, there is a funeral for a member of Charles’s tight-knit circle of friends. (I correctly guessed which character in the film wasn’t going to make it to the end.)

The casting is really good all around and populated with a few capable British actors of the “that guy from that one thing” kind of familiarity such as Simon Callow and John Hannah. Grant anchors the whole thing with that ineffable self-effacing-but-still-maddeningly-charming Grantness; Four Weddings and a Funeral likely would not have worked quite so well without him. MacDowell, impossibly beautiful and elegantly bedecked by the wardrobe department, doesn’t try to match his actorly skill and instead has the good taste to stay poised and reserved, providing an unobtrusive foil for Grant to act off of while still being believable as the kind of woman for whom a guy could fall so hard so fast. Recommended.

Comics Cantata

I said in the last entry that I was going to finish reading We Love You, Snoopy while traveling and you won’t believe this: but I did it. And passed it along to my friends’ twin ten-year-olds to do with as they see fit.

I also re-read some more Calvin and Hobbes. Years ago I got my father the three-volume The Complete Calvin and Hobbes coffee table collection and I keep track of where I left off so I can dip and chip when I’m in my parents’ home. On this excursion I finished the first of the three huge hardbound books in the set.

Roulette

Here are this entry’s three random selections from my complete reading list from 2011 to the present.

Night of the Crash-Test Dummies by Gary Larson, read in 2019. I’ve been a fan of Larson’s legendary newspaper strip The Far Side since I was a child and sometimes I go back and re-read the old collections.

Jazzy in the Jungle by Lucy Cousins, read in 2017. Lucy Cousins makes crudely-rendered, starkly-colored and visually palatable children’s books. Scrutinizing the list I can see I was on a kick with her from 2015 into 2017, noting nine of her books stretching across those years of reading.

As You Were: a punk comix anthology, volume four “Living Situations” by various, edited by Mitch Clem and Avi Ehrlich, read in 2015. I’m pretty sure Avi gave me a copy of this personally, or maybe it came to me by way of Andy Warner whose work is featured in this volume of the anthology published by Avi’s company Silver Sprocket. Reviewing a list of the cartoonist contributors aside from Andy, I see colleagues, friends, enemies, rivals, frenemies, frivals and collomies. Silver Sprocket’s shop here in San Francisco probably has copies of this book on hand if you want to go get one and while you’re there you can also pick up my book from Fantagraphics, which I know for a fact they stock because I’ve seen ‘em do it.

Literature Libretto

Lemme tell you, I’m really dragging the shit out of this re-read of Orlando: A Biography. I’ve already broken it up around other reads and lugged it to the east coast where I made barely any additional progress, though I have now cleared the two-hundred-page mark. I’m kind of surprised I got through it once years ago because it’s just not that much fun to read. It’s fantastical and deeply weird and has some ahead-of-its-time thought experiments to unfurl about the nature of sex traits and sociosexual relations in humans. But I think finally that as a genre send-up of stuffy, brittle Oxbridge boutique-press biographies of obscure figures from English history it veers rather closer to pastiche than parody. And for this reason it’s often more boring than funny or exciting, though there are a couple of bravura passages including the batshit-insane sex-transition sequence in which Orlando is visited by three mysterious spirit-figures titled Our Lady of Purity, Our Lady of Chastity and Our Lady of Modesty (italics Woolf’s) who oversee Orlando’s turning-by-magic from a man into a woman.

Anyway, fuck man I don’t know. I mean I want to finish re-reading this book mainly so I can rack it up on the complete reading list, which I didn’t start keeping until after the last time I read Woolf’s novel. I just want it on there for the cred, you dig? I’m Woolfpack for the cred. I’ll finish it sometime, I swear it. But I also went ahead and put the next James Ellroy book I want to re-read on hold with the library and nobody puts Ellroy in a corner.

(This is basically unrelated but while in New York City my buddy and I (the one with the twin youngsters) stopped in to an exhibit at the public library that included Virginia Woolf’s cane, her real cane that she actually owned. This is the kind of sick and serendipitous shit in which I take a perverse pride: looking at Virginia Woolf’s real, actual cane while holding one of her books in my hand.)

Here are the books that actually did make the complete list for this entry because I read them in entirety.

Thomas Jefferson: His Words and Vision, this edition from 1998, written by Thomas Jefferson and edited by Nick Beilenson. I found this on a sidewalk in San Francisco. It’s a tiny stocking-stuffer-type book containing noteworthy and easily-digestible quotations from the pen of Thomas Jefferson. I read it before embarking for Philadelphia because anything Jefferson-related can be construed as a Philadelphia conceptual tie-in. While at the above-mentioned exhibit with the Woolf cane we also saw a copy of the Declaration of Independence copied over in Jefferson’s own hand, so there’s an additional and additionally-serendipitous tie-in for you.

Benjamin Franklin: Wit and Wisdom, this edition from 1998, written by Benjamin Franklin with woodcuts "adapted from the crude cuts of Joseph Crawhall." I found this on a sidewalk in San Francisco. It’s a tiny stocking-stuffer-type book containing noteworthy and easily-digestible quotations from the press of Benjamin Franklin. I read it after embarking for Philadelphia because anything Franklin-related can be construed as a Philadelphia conceptual tie-in. After I finished reading it I gave it to the above-mentioned ten-year-olds along with that Peanuts book. Word is they were more into the Peanuts book.

Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg from 2003 by James M. McPherson. I read this crisply succinct history/guide book once before some years ago but this time I did it while actually walking around Gettysburg myself.

My parents took me to Gettysburg on a family trip when I was sixteen but I squandered the opportunity because I was a laddish and uninterested idiot. Since then I’ve become deeply fascinated by the Civil War and so I suggested to my mother that she and I take a trip to Gettysburg together while I was on the east coast since it takes less than three hours to drive there from the part of New Jersey where they live. She ended up asking my father and their dog to come along for the ride.

So I brought the McPherson book along with me and re-read it over the course of this east coast trip, including reexamining passages about specific sectors of the battlefield while standing at those precise locations, sometimes with my folks at hand and sometimes by myself. (On our second day there I traversed most of the southern portion of the battlefield alone, eventually walking from the Round Tops up along Cemetery Ridge, across Pickett’s Charge and the Peach Orchard to Seminary Ridge and northward all the way into the town of Gettysburg itself.) As she did before my mother very kindly handled all of the accommodations; this time she had a more well-informed son in tow and could afford to skimp out on a professional tour guide.

I’ve read four books about Gettysburg and have a decent working knowledge of the Battle and its context. (And I’ve read five non-Gettysburg books by McPherson, easily our finest Civil War writer living or dead.) What distinguishes Hallowed Ground from other Gettysburg books is the conceit of McPherson “walking” the battlefield throughout his narrative recreation of the Battle itself, acting as a prose-guide and congenial commentator who uses geographical locale and topography to enliven his descriptions both of the important events that took place at various points as well as modern-day amenities like observation towers and monuments that populate the Gettysburg National Military Park today.

It was pretty fucking incredible to stand for example at the Angle where the few Confederates who completed Pickett’s Charge clambered over the zig-zagging stone wall at the crest of Cemetery Ridge and clawed their way to the Copse of Trees that served as their desperate rallying point, the “high-water mark of the Confederacy” where Union troopers closed around and repelled them in vicious hand-to-hand fighting. Or at the north end of the second-day Union line on Culp’s Hill where Union defenders and Confederate attackers traded control of the improvised breastworks that the Army of the Potomac had erected under the supervision of General Greene. Or near the southernmost end of the line in Devil’s Den, walking among the slopes and rocks where the Confederate attackers fought uphill from boulder to boulder. Or the Round Tops (Little Round Top is currently closed for refurbishment but I got a priceless side-on view of it from Devil’s Den), or the Wheatfield, or the Peach Orchard, or Seminary Ridge, or the point at which Union cavalryman John Buford espied Heth’s infantry division and established the Battle’s first contact between enemy combatants, or the precise spot where General Reynolds was shot dead by a Confederate sharpshooter as he rushed to Buford’s assistance crucial reinforcements that helped slow the Confederate advance while the rest of the Army of the Potomac filed into Gettysburg to fight it out and ultimately hand Lee and Longstreet the long-overdue drubbing they deserved.

You get the idea. For a Civil War enthusiast like myself it was a marvelous, fascinating and nearly spiritual experience, because of my more mature level of knowledge even more so than when I visited the battlefields of Manassas or Antietam.

I didn’t get around to going to the spot where Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg address and reciting it from memory. I could have but that particular parlor trick is probably best reserved for when I am trying to impress women. If you are a Civil War nerd woman who would be so impressed and is looking for a nice and employed fellow to help reconnoiter your Round Tops and mount an assault on your Peach Orchard — our operators are standing by.