New Daily Devotional Reading: The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough

I shouldn't have waited until the last minute to decide what my next DDR book would be. But I have so many things on hand...and I was still a bit woozy from reading 4,379 pages of Churchill, followed by a quick slug of Krasznahorkai...y'know? And as I began to ponder what to go to next, I picked up a book I'd just checked out from the library...

...and thought, "Well...why not?" I'd happened upon it by accident. I had just learned that Seth, the cartoonist who produced (among other things) the brilliant Clyde Fans, also had a book / documentary about the town of Dominion, where part of Clyde Fans was set. So before buying it (which I ended up doing), I checked to see if the library had a copy. They didn't (hence the buying of it), but this Dominion book popped up. And they really had me at the Dali, but the sub-title seemed like my 🍵, so I picked it up. I started reading it last night, and it looked like it was going to me right up my alley. There was this bit, for instance:

"Luxury and splendor such as Rome could boast were dependent, in the final reckoning, on keeping those who sustained it in their place. 'After all, we have slaves drawn from every corner of the world in our households, practicing strange customs, and foreign cults, or none--and it is only by means of terror that we can hope to coerce such scum.'" 

The quote is from The Annals 14.44 by Tacitus. In fairness to Mr. Tacitus, I feel compelled to note that I found a different translation which rendered those final insulting words as the phrase, a motley rabble.* But even though the extremity of the language can be mitigated, the brutality of the concept remains starkly clear.

And starkly relevant to Wigan Pier in 1936...or to the United States of America in 2021. And maybe it's just always been and always will be the way of the world, as the afore-alluded-to Orwell said in 1984...a book which is almost as good as The Road to Wigan Pier. But even if it is true in the absolute value sense, that doesn't make it hurt any less...and doesn't lessen my hope...my prayer...that things will be different someday.

Another thing that I found interesting:

"HOW IS IT THAT A cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal and a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring influence on the world?"

I mean...yeah. ("Now why'd you choose such a backward time and such a strange land?")

So I read the first thirty pages. But a couple of things started to grate on me. For one thing, Mr. Holland likes to slip in slang terms...such as "po-faced," which perhaps suggests that he is a cool and with it and irreverent kind of historian fellow to some...but to me it just seemed like a four year old telling his mom "Look at me!" as he makes a half-assed attempt at a cartwheel. And then I started thinking about that "scum" bit above, and went back to ground and found some more stuff (see **) which shook my confidence further. So I started thinking that maybe this wasn't the book for me after all.

And I went back to my bookshelf and pulled out 

This one has several things going for it: (1) it was given to me by my #1🌞, (2) it's written by David McCullough, about whom I've heard good things, and (3) I'd previously become interested in the building of the Brooklyn Bridge when I read a comic book about it (The Bridge: How the Roeblings Connected Brooklyn to New York by Peter Tomasi and Sara DuVall), which was so interesting that (4) I watched the Ken Burns documentary Brooklyn Bridge (1981), and (5) it's not written by Tom Holland.

So I read the first 20 pages. I think this is it.

* https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/textdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0078%3Abook%3D14%3Achapter%3D44 **

** I didn't leave well enough alone here, though, when I went back to do some editing on this entry. I found another translation in which the "offensive phrase" was rendered as a medley of humanity. Hmmm. That's quite a different flavor, isn't it? I started getting suspicious. So I found a Latin version of Tacitus' Annals 14:44. The salient phrase is this: quidam insontes peribunt. Google's Latin to English translator says that this means...a motley rabble. It also tells me that "this scum" would be ut labore sudatum in Latin...or that "scum" would be spumae...neither of which appear in the Latin text. (See http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0077%3Abook%3D14%3Achapter%3D44.) And of course that doesn't prove that Tom Holland is willfully mistranslating the passage in order to leverage up the drama...but it sure does suggest that that is a possibility, doesn't it? Hopefully it's needless to say that I don't like that in a "historian." 

Day 1 (DDRD 1,336): June 30, 2021

So we're off you know.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge by David McCullough is 636 pages long, including the prefatory material. I'm thinking that it's a 20 page a day kind of thing, so that would make it a 32 day project, meaning I should be able to finish it by the last day of July. Check? Check.

Read the first 20 pages. Which means that I didn't even get to page 1 of the text itself, but I may go back for some more later on. As for the preliminaries...interesting stuff. McCullough's story of how he came to write this book...and of the huge chance he took in writing it, quitting his day job when he had a large family depending on him, no savings to speak of, and only the advance on the book to live on, was inspiring. (Although it also made me wonder, "Who the hell takes that kind of chance when he has a family with five children depending on him?" As always, courage and irresponsibility go hand in hand, I suppose.) So, yeah. I'm interested.

I'm also kind of thinking that I might read a few more pages of Dominion, just to see if Tom Holland is as full of shit as my preliminary observations gauge him to be. It could happen.

Day 2 (DDRD 1,337): July 1, 2021

Read to page 40. Meeting the cast of characters...chief among them (for the nonce) John A. Roebling, the guy behind the whole Brooklyn Bridge project. He seems kind of nutty...and looks a bit that as well:

Public Domain

Thus far the book is kind of interesting, but not particularly compelling. Of course, anything after Krasznahorkai might seem pretty tame on that count.

As for Dominion...I read a few more pages, then glanced at a few pages further on, and decided that this just wasn't worth my time. If you've read it and think obversely, 🤙.

Day 3 (DDRD 1,338): July 2, 2021

Read to page 60. Long and busy day, so I didn't finish until 10:00 pm, and I have to confess that I was starting to blink out here and there. Not the material's fault at all. In fact, as we continue to follow John A. Roebling's life, I get more and more interested in him.

The bad news: the first proofreading error has been found.

Page 44:

1

John A. Roebling was a lot of things during his life, but a steamboat wasn't one of them.

Sigh. I expected better of you, .

Day 4 (DDRD 1,339...after having conducted several different counts, I am moderately certain that today is actually DDRD 1,340. Not sure when I messed up, but I'm not willing to go back to find out, so I'm just going to make it so: 1,340): July 3, 2021

Read to page 80.

Found this lovely Public Domain picture on Wikipedia:

From 1876. A vivid illustration of the truth of McCullough's assertion that when it was built, the Brooklyn Bridge was one of the tallest structures in New York City...as hard as that is to believe now.

And in what I regard as a fairly amazing coincidence, after posting the above picture and writing the comment about it, I opened a new window to check my Facebook page, saw there was a new post by Heather Cox Richardson, and had just started reading it when I saw this: "Still angry after the votes of Black southerners tipped the contested election of 1876 to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, Democrats set out to stop government protection of Black voters before the next presidential election." (https://www.facebook.com/heathercoxrichardson) 

So that's what 1876 was like. 

By the way, I forgot one of the most striking bits of biographical information with respect to John A. Roebling: one of his teachers was Hegel. As in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. As GWFH considered Roebling to be his 🌟pupil🌟. That's kind of a big deal, mmm?

As for today's 20, Roebling took a group of his prospective Brooklyn Bridge folks on a tour of some of his past projects (kind of a 3-D resume), and there were some very interesting things along the way. I looked up pictures of a few of them:

The Allegheny River Bridge:

http://www.brooklineconnection.com/history/Facts/SixthStreetBridge.html

The Cincinati-Covington Bridge (now the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge), opened December 1, 1866, and still in use today:

Public Domain

That one looks a bit like the Brooklyn Bridge, doesn't it? 

There was also a bit about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge & the disaster which befell it (which I first came to know courtesy of Los Lobos' video for "Shakin', Shakin' Shakes."

Needless to say this was not a Roebling bridge.

I was also interested / amused to find that another non-Roebling bridge in Pittsburgh had been named after one of that city's most famous native sons: The David McCullough Bridge. From what I can discern, it's not far from the defunct Alleghany River Bridge built by Roebling back in the day. 

Day 5 (DDRD 1,341): 🎆July 4, 2021🎆

Read to page 100. 

And as I was flipping through he back pages, I happened to notice that there were Notes. Hmmm. How could I have read 100 pages (plus introductory material) without noticing that there were notes? Fortunately not too many pages of them at this point, so I can do a quick catch-up, but still...how'd I miss that? Well. I looked back at the text. No numbers for notes. No asterisks. No other funny symbols. I flipped back to the notes. They were only labeled with the page that they were on, followed by the notes. That may be the least intrusive method for putting notes in a text that I've ever seen. Also the stupidest. I mean, fuck...you could at least give us a heads up, y'know? So I guess after I get caught up I'll just have to be a bit more wary. Or just read all the notes after the chapter so that they don't pile up. Still...what the fuck, Chuck? As I was thinking those thoughts, it also occurred to me that all notes should be at the bottom of the page, the way God intended them to be. Footnotes. And the concurrent thought that endnotes of any kind are an abomination. So it shall be written, so it shall be done. 

Good thing I'm not teaching high school English anymore.

I found a couple of interesting things in Today's 20. First, when listing John Roebling's children, Mr. McCullough refers to the oldest daughter, Laura, and in talking about her family notes that she and her husband "had a number of children." (96) It just hit me that to Mr. M, this so-called Laura was so insignificant that not only did her children's' names not matter, but even the NUMBer of them was not worth taking note of. (Not to mention the name of her husband.) And I don't mean that as a cut on McCullough. The truth is that those children and that husband were not significant. But it made me think about how many of us...self included, of course...are insignificant. We lead our tiny little lives and then we die, and no one notices. Well, that's probably not ever literally true. But very few people notice, and the greater world doesn't register our presence or our passing one whit. What are people for? In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov suggests (or at least implies) that the mass of useless people only exist so that an extraordinary person can be cast up out of them every once in a while. It's like rolling dice. You roll a dozen times, then you finally get a good roll. The good roll doesn't exist without the bad rolls that preceded it. 

Well. That's more than a little bit depressing.

The second thing I found interesting was this bit:

Roebling said to his son Washington, when he was encouraging him to join the army to fight against the South in The Civil War, "When a whole nation had been steeped for a whole century in sins of iniquity, it may require a political tornado to purify its atmosphere." Well THAT sounds familiar. 

P.S. Also found a book which looks very interesting: Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol by Alan Trachtenberg which is available for free check out on Archive.org...or you can buy a copy for cheap at Better World Books or Thrift Books.

P.P.S. McCullough also mentioned a guy who worked for Roebling, one William H. Paine who seemed like a truly amazing guy. I looked around to see if a biography of him was available, but didn't turn one up. Did find a picture of him standing on the work-in-progress Brooklyn Bridge, though--

from https///blog.nyhistory.org/william-h-paine-assistant-engineer-of-the-brooklyn-bridge/

Paine is "believed to be" the second guy from the right. 

Day 6 (DDRD 1,342): July 5, 2021

Read to page 121. Also "read" pages 215 - 230 & 417 - 433, which were the picture pages. They did have captions, though, so I really did do a bit of reading there as well.

During the course of Today's 20 I was introduced to one Henry Ward Beecher (Harriet Beecher Stowe's brother), who was an important Brooklyn preacher. 

Beecher as Gulliver (1885) Bernhard Gillam • Public domain

I've also noticed that David McCullough has an irritating habit of describing people in unflattering terms...specifically in terms of Beecher as "too well fed." How the fuck is that pertinent? It's not the only example of this kind of body shaming, either. I know those were different times, but for fuck's sake, y'know?

Day 7 (DDRD 1,343): July 6, 2021

Read to page 140. Lots about Boss Tweed, quite an interesting character. Also learned (first time for me) about the first subway, Beach's Tunnel...which was shut down by the aforementioned Tweed. 

Public Domain
Beach Pneumatic Transit in New York City. Eröffnet 1870, geschlossen 1875

Those dates seemed questionable to me, and when I read the Wikipedia text which accompanied the picture, indeed the dates of operation were given as 1870 to 1873. So some(German)body wasn't very careful when s/he did her/his homework.

Hard to believe that this isn't a proofreading error:

But apparent "cooky" is acceptable. Not to me, but to some folks.

Day 8 (DDRD 1,344): July 7, 2021

Read to page 160.

McCullough tells an interesting story about The Cardiff Giant--a statue planted in a field, then dug up and declared to be the ancient remains of a member of a vanished race. Even after scientists proved that this was a fraud people flocked to see it, paying admission to do so. Even more bizarre, PT Barnum had a copy of it made when he found he could not buy the "original,"and people flocked to see the copy of the fraud as well. And we wonder how Trump holds people in his sway.

A couple of annoying proofreading errors.

From page 147:

2

Explicate is a verb, not an adjective.

And when I saw "patroon"...well, I just thought that was really funny. Especially as it evokes "poltroon," as in "You timorous poltroon." (Chaucer, "The Nun's Priest's Tale.")

But live and learn: according to our friends at Google / Oxford Languages, a patroon is "a person given land and granted certain manorial privileges under the former Dutch governments of New York and New Jersey." Well, roll me in cracker crumbs and bake me at 450 degrees. 

Day 9 (DDRD 1,345): July 8, 2021

Read to page 180. Some very interesting stuff as they begin to build the caissons--

Public Domain

--but I'm sick for the first time in a year and a half (sick baby, grandpa), so I'm just going to say...Holy Shit! These things were half a city block big, and "only" cost $100,000 to build at a local shipyard. 

P.S. Still feeling pretty awful (thanks for asking, though), but I just stopped at the library to pick up this bit of loveliness:

Plucked from the obscurity of Remote Shelving. News as it happens.

Day 10 (DDRD 1,346): July 9, 2021

Read to page 200.

Day 11 (DDRD 1,347): July 10, 2021

Read to page 230--but not really, because I hit that first section of picture pages which I'd already read.

McCullough's style grates on me a little bit. He goes into way too much detail on some things, like descriptions of how mechanical things work. Which I would usually enjoy, but--at least to me--his descriptions are not clear enough for me to actually understand what he is attempting to say, so it would have been much better to just leave it out and say, for instance, that the water shafts brought the excavated debris to the top of the caisson...rather than try to tell me how they did that. It's just roughage, man. Which makes me wonder if I'm going to be game for more McCullough after I finish this book. (I have The Path between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914, also a gift from #1🌞, and for that reason I'd like to read it, but...well, we'll see. McCullough does tell an interesting story, for sure, he has that going for him. But there really are just too many notes sometimes.

In other news....

Fulton Street comes up a lot in this book, and I kept thinking that when Jacqueline and I went to New York City the second time that we had stayed in a hotel and had walked past or even on Fulton Street. So I poked into my emails and found that we had actually stayed at the Pointe Plaza Hotel, 2 Franklin Avenue, Brooklyn, NY, US, 11211, and that it was just a little over two miles from it to the closest bit of Fulton Street. And since we walked all over the place, it is indeed possible that we walked past it, and since we road to subway into and back from Manhattan every day, I would guess that we passed a Fulton Street station. But this is the 21st century, so I didn't have to guess, much less remember, I just went online and found a map of the New York Subway system...

...and as you can see, there was a Fulton Street stop. And I remembered that Jacqueline and I had ridden a blue train to get to our hotel, so that was that. Almost. Because I then went back to a regular map, found our hotel, then clicked on Directions and typed in Subway Stop and guess what came up? 

Yep. That was the station where we caught the subway every day. So there's that. Also, whilst perusing the map of Brooklyn to trace the path of Fulton Street, I found this amusing coincidence:

Yep. Dekalb Avenue. So clearly this was all meant to be, right? I was destined to read David McCullough's Bridge Book.

Also, saw this periodical alluded to in the End Notes--

--and thought that surely George (Nostrand) should use this as an album cover at some point...right?

Day 12 (DDRD 1,348): July 11, 2021

Read to page 250.

There's a story about how a man in the caisson wanted to have a look into his lunch pail, which was hanging up high on a hook, and got his candle too close to the wall, starting a fire. The fire went up into the ceiling, and was almost undetectable, but in the end it caused immense damage and delayed work on the bridge for several months. McCullough tells us that even initially, 1,350,000 gallons of water were used to try to extinguish the fire, and that the operation involved a fire boat, five tug boats, and several fire engines including "two or three brought over on the ferry from New York." DMcC also relates that "one tug alone was pumping 8,000 gallons a minute...." One paper estimated the damage to have cost "$250,000," but keeping in mind that this is 1870, that becomes (according to the online Inflation Calculator) over $5 million today. That's a big price for a careless moment with a candle. Even more significant, though, is that Roebling spent so much time in the caisson trying to deal with the problem that he collapsed, which seems to have been the beginning of the physical problems which would render him an invalid before the bridge could be completed. In a funny way, this shows how much influence a seemingly insignificant person can have upon the world, doesn't it? 

Day 13 (DDRD 1,349): July 12, 2021

Read to page 270. Mostly about New York ( / Brooklyn, since the two seem to be separate cities at this time) politics, much of it involving Boss Tweed, who reminds me of Donald Trump more than a little bit.

Day 14 (DDRD 1,350): July 13, 2021

Read to page 290. 

Day 15 (DDRD 1,351): July 14, 2021

Read to page 315. A few extra pages because I was stuck inside of the Honda Waiting Room with the Recall Blues Again. It was mostly about the bends...originally known as Caisson's Disease.

Day 16 (DDRD 1,352): July 15, 2021

Read to page 340--just to even things up.

Here's A Thing I Found Interesting:

In 1876 in New York, the ten story Western Union Telegraph Building designed by George B. Post finished was finished. At 230 feet, it was then the tallest office building not only in New York City, but in the entire nation. Even so, it was 50 feet shorter than the top of the New York tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Hard to believe that this--

Public Domain

--was once the tallest building in New York City. 

Hell, there's a taller office building less than a mile from my front door...in suburban little ole Louisville, for Pete's sake.

Day 17 (DDRD 1,353): July 16, 2021

Read to page 360. Some startling details about the cable. "Each of the nineteen strands in a finished cable would be continuous wire some 185 miles in length, drawn from one anchorage to the other, up and over the towers, back and forth, back and forth, above the river. Each cable would contain just over 3,515 miles of wire and the wire in all four cables would come to more than 14,000 miles." (351)

Day 18 (DDRD 1,354): July 17, 2021

Read to page 380.

I'm not sure what it is, but today I had a rather blasphemous thought: I'm ready for this book to be over. It's strange, because I'm interested in the story & have found many of the anecdotes and facts to be fascinating, but still, there's something that is putting me off. I'm certainly not planning to go on to the Panama Canal book after this, though. My best guess is that David McCullough's writing style is just gradually wearing on my last reading nerve. He continues to go into way too much detail about things that are really not at all important (at least to me), and, worse, his details don't give a cohesive enough picture of what he's attempting to describe...and there are no illustrations for this stuff. So it ends up just being fat paragraphs full of empty words. I read them, but I might as well not.

Day 19 (DDRD 1,355): July 18, 2021

Read to page 400.

Started thinking again about whether or not I want to stick with David McCullough after I finish this one. So I Googled, Best Book by David McCullough, just to see what Someone thought about that topic. And? Well...according to Bookscrolling.com (specifically THIS), McCullough's five best books are 1. Truman, 2. The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, 3. The Wright Brothers, 4. The Great Bridge, and 5. John Adams. (And they actually have these last three in a tie for third place.) And then at 6. they have The Path Between the Seas. So that's not a good sign, is it?

Meanwhile, in Today's 20....

On page 388 there is a quote from Roebling's 1876 Annual Report which says, in part, "...the building of the whole bridge is a matter of trust." Is it possible that Billy Joel was alluding to this in his song? I mean, the song is entitled "A Matter of Trust," and it's on the album The Bridge. Not to mention that Billy was born in New York City, and that his mother was born in Brooklyn. And if that's not enough, there's a video entitled Building the Bridge (which you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EaqSg9eYqIc), and after a short spoken introduction by Mr. Joels, here's a shot from the opening title sequence:

Possibly all coincidental, but I don't think it would be all that odd for Billy Joel to be thinking about The Brooklyn Bridge...and that he had read some stuff about its history. 

One of my favorite things about reading is the way that it fissions into other ideas / books / etceteras. It's like at some point the connectivity between everything in the universe will just spill out, ya know? (And if not, what's a Heaven for?)

Day 20 (DDRD 1,356): July 19, 2021

Read to page 435. (Hit the second batch of pictures, hence the overage.)

Day 21 (DDRD 1,357): July 20, 2021

Read to page 462. Which means 100 text pages to go.

Here's a paragraph which really bugged me:

McCullough lets this bullshit go by without any kind of comment... without even indicating that he sees any irony in the appellation applied to this motherfucker. I don't like that. You're pushing me farther and farther away from the Panama Canal, Mr. McCullough.

Day 22 (DDRD 1,358): July 21, 2021

Read to page 480. 

Day 23 (DDRD 1,359): July 22, 2021

Read to page 500. Also read the Appendix material. When I finish the text, I want to be finished with this book. (And that's a near future event now.)

Day 24 (DDRD 1,360): July 23, 2021

Read to page 520. Also finished Appendix (563 - 565), most of the Notes (567 - 598, with 599 - 600 to go), Picture Credits (601), Bibliography (603 - 612), & Index (613 - 636). So yes, the end is very near now. As in two more days and done. So it is time to think about what comes next, for sure.

I am thinking I will do something like I did this time around, and have a start on McCullough's Panama Canal book either before I finish this book or simultaneously with another book...that way if it is not to my liking, I can bail on it. And the other book would be...what? I do have quite a few choices. 

As for Today's 20, there was an interesting mention that one of Thomas Edison's early films (September 22, 1899) was of a railroad journey across The Brooklyn Bridge, so I had a little Google and...yep. You can watch it HERE. The 21st Century is pretty amazing. Even if it did cheat us out of the flying cars.

P.S. Got stuck inside of my room with the no other books to read again, so I read a few more pages...to page 528...and finished off the last two pages of notes. So now a mere 34 pages to go, which means that tomorrow might well be it for this one.

Day 25 (DDRD 1,361): July 24, 2021

Read to page 562. And you know what that means. Finito. Done. Fat Lady sings.

A few things, and then...outta here.

In his description of the celebrations which accompanied the opening of The Bridge, McCullough says that for most of the crowd "...it was more like watching men go through the motions of making a speech."  And later he says "...the speakers went through their pantomime orations." It made me think of how detached I feel from most celebratory things. Fireworks on the 4th of July (or, in my neighborhood, for the first two weeks of July, minimum): it's just silly and annoying. Same for parades (I have never willingly watched a parade), New Year's Eve festivities, holiday decorations, etc. It all just seems like a lot of whoop-de-do for nothing. I have neighbors who put up signs that say, "Autumn" and shit like that. Presumably there are those who would be clueless as to the season if not for that sign. Bah. I know, it's just me being a grumpy old bitch, but I have to say that I have been this way for as long as I can remember...and I can remember back 60 years now. To me it just means that people who don't have very much imagination are trying to make their lives seem more important than they really are. So I felt that McCullough was at least a little bit on my side of it when he commented thusly.

Ahn de otter hunt...here's the kind of thing I hate seeing in McCullough's writing: he makes reference to Hart Crane's poem The Bridge, saying that it is a "powerful but not altogether coherent masterpiece." Well, so glad that God appointed Mr. McCullough the final authority on the quality of poetry. And beyond that...why take this potshot at a fellow writer? It's not like this book is an in-depth examination of Hart Crane's poetry. It's a passing reference. There's absolutely no need to be pissing on the flowers here.

Speaking of Hart Crane, reading this reference to him made me go looking for the poem. I could only find it in a collection of Crane's poetry in the LFPL system...and most of the copies of those were Remote Shelving things. Did find one at a library I have rarely gone to since breaking up with a librarian who worked there, but I might stop in and grab it off of the shelf. I also stumbled upon the fact that there was a movie made about Hart Crane, The Broken Tower. I've looked for it online, but so far the only options are buy it from Amazon or rent it from Amazon, and I have been staying away from Amazon since December of last year. We'll see how that hunt goes, though. News as it happens!

And...that's all, folks. I did read the first 20 pages or so of McCullough's Panama Canal book, and I might go ahead and do it next. I'm going to try to read a little bit more today before I make my final decision, since I still have 24 hours or so before I sign my commitment papers.

DDR Day 1000 to Day 2000:

(1) Leviathan 63 days, 729 pages

(2) Stalingrad 27 days, 982 pages

(3) Life and Fate 26 days, 880 pages

(4) The Second World War 34 + 32 + 40 + 43 + 31 + 32 days = 212 days, 4,379 pages 

Sub-Total: 6,970 pages...more than 1/2 of my first 1,000 DDR days total, btw

(5) Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming 10 days, 572 pages

(6) The Great Bridge __ days, 636 pages

Shara Nova Music on Naxos!

I got a notice on Facebook this morning that Maya Beiser (cellist) had a new album coming out on which she played some Philip Glass music. I'd run into Maya by accident--I was on the Louisville Free Public Library website perusing the available Naxos Music, and the thought occurred to me that they probably had Philip Glass's (small world, ennit?) Low and Heroes symphonies. So I typed David Bowie into the search box. No Low and no Heroes, but there were a couple of things, one of which piqued my interest considerably: Blackstar - Bowie Cello Symphonic. By Maya Beiser. So I listened to that (worth doing), then I went looking for some information on Ms. Beiser. Including on Facebook. Which is, presumably, why I received the notice about her new album.

So I went back to the Naxos Library and typed in Maya Beiser, knowing that the new album wouldn't be there, but I'd already forgotten that she was the one behind Blackstar, so I thought I would listen to some of her stuff, see if she had recorded any Philip Glass previously, allathat. And as I looked at the list of titles under her name, one jumped out at me:

Because this name

(which is the same person--Shara Nova is her post-divorce name) is very near and dear to me. Pretty much from the first time that I heard Shara's voice (on an album I had plucked out of a budget bin because it had drawings of sharks on the cover--I knew nothing about the music it contained), she has been my favorite female vocalist. So needless to say this was quite a find for me. Four "new" albums!

SNIDER, S.K.: Unremembered (Worden, Newsome, Stith, The Unremembered Orchestra, Outwater)

Shara does vocals on this album.

Chamber Music - BJARNASON, D. / CORLEY, P. / MAZZOLI, M. / MUHLY, N. / SIROTA, N. / GREENSTEIN, J. / WORDEN, S. (Baroque) (Sirota)

Includes the Shara composition "From the Invisible to the Visible."

LANG, D.: Death Speaks / Depart (Worden, Dessner, Muhly, Pallett, Farnum, Geissinger, Montano, Sweeton, Beiser)

On "Death Speaks" Shara does vocals & bass drum.

SNIDER, S.K.: Penelope (Worden, Signal, Lubman)

Shara does all of the vocals on this album.

And then I started thinking.... Shara' last name been changed in part of the information but not all of it. What if I did a search for Shara Nova? So I did. And? Two more albums appeared:

LANG, D.: Village Detective: a song cycle (The) (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (S. Nova, F. Andersen) 

Shara does the vocals on this one.

ZIYALAN, M.: Letters to Distant Cities

On which Shara performs and co-wrote one song.

I was a bit puzzled by this last album, because I'd previously bought

which is a true Shara album.

Interesting.

Well, got to go. I've got a lot of music to listen to today.

The Book I'm Reading to Joe: The Outlaw of Torn by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Public Domain
Note: Not only doesn't The Outlaw of Torn get the illustration, 
it doesn't even get mentioned by name on the cover!

This is actually my second time reading The Outlaw of Torn, since I previously read it solo. This reading is also the 66th Edgar Rice Burroughs book I have read out loud to Joe. (18 to go!)

The Outlaw of Torn was the second novel that ERB wrote...following hard on the heels of A Princess of Mars and just before Tarzan of the Apes. But the publishing history is a bit convoluted here. To wit:

A Princess of Mars was serialized from February–July, 1912, but was not published as a hardcover until 1917.

The Outlaw of Torn was serialized from January to May 1914, but was not published in book form until 1927.

And Tarzan of the Apes was first published in magazine form in October 1912, and was subsequently published in book form in 1914.

So ERB's first book was Tarzan of the Apes, but it was actually his third novel. And his first novel was his second published book. His second book was not published until much later...after he'd published many other books. From what I remember from the ERB biographies I've read, the publisher kept requesting rewrites from ERB, and even after he had acquiesced a number of times, they still didn't want to publish it. 

Last night we read Chapter V--and by the way, the book is now in the public domain, and you can read it in its entirety on Project Gutenberg (HERE)--and I was struck (probably for the second time, but I'd forgotten this detail in the time since my first reading) by the name of one of the English knights who enter the story at this point:

ERB did a lot of this crossover kind of thing...so Tarzan (and his kin) do pop up in other works, but this was the earliest "crossover," for sure, and it also made me wonder: did ERB write The Outlaw of Torn before he had written Tarzan of the Apes? I think that is true. Of course, he could have inserted the Greystoke name later on in one of his many rewrites, but still...I thought it was interesting. Also, The Outlaw of Torn is set in 13th century England...so this knight fellow would have been Tarzan's Great x 32 * Grandfather. 

And by the way...The Outlaw of Torn is a thrilling read. ERB encountered great resistance from his publishers any time he tried to step out of the Tarzan universe, but the truth (as I know it to be) is that his best books were not Tarzan stories. It makes me wonder what else he would have written if he'd been allowed off of the Tarzan leash earlier on...which he obviously desired, I think from about the sixth outing. (I'm relying on a hazy memory there, but I know for certain ** that he had no desire to write 24 *** Tarzan novels.)

* -ish.

** Based upon reading several in-depth biographies.

*** 26 if you include the Golden Lion kiddie books, and 27 if you include The Lost Adventure, which was completed by  Joe R. Lansdale.

My Books

Hmmm. Looks like Amazon has made my two Kindle works (one a novel, the other a long story) very difficult to locate on their website. So if only for myself, here's where to find them: 

A Matter of Reason is at 

https://www.amazon.com/Matter-Reason-Thomas-Kalb-ebook/dp/B01M3RMEW8/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=%22thomas+kalb%22&qid=1624826311&s=books&sr=1-1

"Davey" is at

https://www.amazon.com/daveY-Thomas-Kalb-ebook/dp/B01BTZGIGO/ref=sr_1_4?dchild=1&qid=1624826367&refinements=p_27%3AThomas+Kalb&s=digital-text&sr=1-4&text=Thomas+Kalb

A Brief History of Palookaville #16

I was reading my copy of Clyde Fans Book One, and for some reason I looked back to read the indicia and noticed, for the first time, that it said that this book included contents from issues 10 through 15 of Palookaville. I looked at my single issue copies of the comic book, which I'd laid out preparatory to reading the "complete" Clyde Fans, and the first single issue I had was #17.

What?

I'd spent four years (since the publication of the final Clyde Fans Palookaville, which was #23, published July 2017) thinking that I had read the Complete Clyde Fans. Had I really missed an issue? I checked and re-checked. I scratched my head. I walked in circles.

Yes. I had missed a piece of Clyde Fans, and I'd never even noticed.

I got to work right away. Amazon had a copy for $32.93. It wasn't in stock at Mycomicshop, and Mile High Comics seemingly hadn't heard of it. I went over to eBay. There were a few copies, there, some as pricey as $32.93. (Hmmmm.) And then I found a copy for $1.00 + $5.00 shipping + 36¢ tax =  $6.36.

Fri 6/18/2021 10:34 PM: Order Confirmed

Wed 6/23/2021 12:24 AM Order Being Shipped

Fri 6/25/2021 5:42 PM: Order delivered

Just finished reading it.

This was first of the four part Part Three. It focused on an older Simon taking care of his ailing mother, and only had a brief appearance by Abe. In many ways it was a parallel to the first part of Part One, wherein the older Abe wandered through his house, monologuing. The mother was suffering from dementia, and it vividly brought back memories of my mom in her last years. It wasn't easy to read, that's for sure. But it was powerful and I was caught up in it. Looking forward to reading issues 17 through 23 now (all of which I have in my possession), and thus finishing The Complete Clyde Fans for the first time ever. 

Very exciting.

There was a time when I thought that Alan Moore had written the greatest Graphic Novel of all time with From Hell. Then there was a time when I thought that Jeff Lemire had written the greatest Graphic Novel of all time with Essex County. Etcetera. But now I feel sure that the greatest Graphic Novel of all time is Seth's Clyde Fans. It gets down to the heart of the matter (where the will gets weak and the thoughts seem to scatter). In some ways, it's Beckettian...or even Krasznahorkian. Because while there is some plot, it's clearly not the focus of the story. It's about character, it's about thought. Seth kinda sorta refers to this in an advertisement in the back of Palookaville #16:

"THIS COULD BE JUST AS BORING AS IT SOUNDS." 

"THE EXCITEMENT KNOWS NO BOUNDS!"

The mark of a great mind is the ability to mock him/her self, I think. Self-abnegation is the key...but it's a fine balance, too, of course, since once this tips over into self-destruction, you've lost your way as surely as have the supremely confident / arrogant.

Also, I found it interesting that the second of these advertisements was for Clyde Fans Part Two, which was said to be "AVAILABLE SOON." Because that never happened. 

Okay. I'm off to Palookaville #17. See you there, I hope.

P.S. Shout out to greatthings129, the eBay seller who gave me such a great deal & took care to package this item so carefully that it arrived in pristine condition.

52 for 45

 This reminds me of SOMEone....

The Book I'm Reading: Clyde Fans by Seth

I don't know when I first read a comic book by Seth. I've got a paperback first edition copy of It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken which was published in September of 1996, so that could be it. Of course, I might have bought it later on, too. At any rate, somewhere along the line, I found him, loved him, and started to seek him out.

I enjoyed everything I found--and I found a lot of stuff...maybe even all of it for awhile. (Since the pandemic hit, I've been separated from comic books, and am just now getting back to it.)

I am particularly fond of Clyde Fans. 

I wasn't on board when it started in the pages of Seth's comic book, Palookaville, in issue 10, published in April, 1997. By the time he had published Clyde Fans Part One (January 1, 2000) I had caught on. That one only reprinted issues 10 through 12, though, and I never saw a Part Two. * Instead, four and a half years later (July 1, 2004) I found Clyde Fans: Book 1, a nice hardcover which reprinted issues 10 through 15. I think that must be when I really fell in love with the book...or when I finally started seeing Palookaville on the shelves at The Great Escape...or maybe I started ordering it?... because I didn't wait for Book 2, I started buying the issues. Unfortunately, Seth wasn't the most prolific fellow, so there was at minimum a year between issues, and sometimes more.

17: July 2004, $4.95 

18: October 2005, $4.95 

19: February 2008, $4.95

20: October 2010, $19.95 

21: October 2013, $21.95 

22: April 2015, $22.95

23: July 2017, $22.95

Issues 17 through 19 were pretty pricey for regular format comic books--albeit with nice, heavy covers and interior pages. And with issue 20 the book actually became a hardback book, and the price jumped way up there, as you can see. But I stuck with it...even though I was also waiting for Clyde Fans: Book 2, because I most certainly would have bought that.

But there never was a Book 2, either. Instead, the complete series was published in April 2019. I'm not sure what the price was then, since I didn't buy it, but Amazon currently shows it as $37.86 for a used hardback, $27.49 for a new paperback. (Or, if you're as sick of Amazon's shit as I am, you can get it new in paperback from Walmart for $28.37.) 

That's pretty much all I know about the publishing history. It's an interesting series of false starts, though, isn't it? 

But as I said earlier, I really like Clyde Fans. I think it is one of the best graphic novels ever published, and I've read one hell of a lot of them. Part of my love for it is Seth's drawing style. It's closer to Big Foot than realism, evoking the cartoon style of The New Yorker of a bygone era...maybe the 1940s? But the real draw is Seth's writing. For instance, the first part of the story follows old Abe Matchcard as he awakens and then putters around his house, attending to his morning rituals. As he putters, he talks about the history of his company, Clyde Fans, and spends a considerable amount of his time talking about his somewhat eccentric brother, Simon. It doesn't sound very exciting in summary, but I found it absolutely fascinating, a perfect example of the fractal nature of great writing: you see the whole in the specific. Though I have nothing in common with a retired fan salesman living in a small town in Canada, my heart still aches with Abe as he recounts his rise and fall, and I really want to get to know his quirky brother, Simon. That urge is satisfied in Part Two, as we get off the train with Simon and follow him in his attempts to sell fans to various shopkeepers in the city of Dominion. 

Speaking of Dominion...

Seth built his little city in cardboard. I've seen pictures of it, and it is quite impressive in terms of scope, scale, and detail. Drawn & Quarterly published a book about it--Seth's Dominion--which you can get for a mere $32.95 from D&Q. Its page count is small...a mere 80 pages...but it is filled with lovely photographs and illustrations, and it also includes a dvd of the 42 minute movie Seth's Dominion directed by Luc Chamberland. Seth spent ten years building his city.

A few days ago I started re-reading Clyde Fans...which, of course, is what prompted me to start writing about it. I started with the hardcover Seth Fans Book One, and when I was finished with it I went back to look at the indicia before proceeding to the next installment of the story. That's when I realized what you may have already caught some time ago: this book reprinted issues 10 through 15. My first issue of Palookaville was issue 17. I was missing an issue! If I told you how that felt to me, you would probably be appalled...so I won't tell you. I'll just say that I immediately went on eBay and started looking for issue 16. Fortunately, I not only found it, but found a most reasonable price as well--a mere $6.36, including shipping. So I will soon, for the very first time, read the COMPLETE Clyde Fans. 

I knew I should have purchased that one volume collection when it came out!

ANYway...this is a truly great comic book. If you haven't read or don't like comic books, I think this would be the one which could tip you over into embracing the much maligned literary form. I used to think that Alan Moore's work could do that, but I no longer think so. I love Alan, and have read most of his work...and will continue to do so...but the truth is that he is in some ways as bound by the genre mentality as the lesser practitioners of comic book work. Seth is not. He goes far beyond the constraints that seem to have hardened around almost everyone else. (Chester Brown is another exception, and his excellent work can also be found at Drawn & Quarterly.)

🕊📤

* When I checked, Wikipedia said that Clyde Fans Part Two was published in 2003, and reprinted issues #13–15. I found another reference to it on an Amazon site...can't remember which one, but not the USA version. But I was sure that I would have seen it if it had come out, so I found an email address for Drawn & Quarterly and wrote to them.

Hi. I am attempting to write a piece expressing my lov for & the publication history of Seth's Clyde Fans, and I wanted to see if I could fact check something. I have a copy of Clyde Fans Part One, which collected issues 10 through 12 of Palookaville, but I have never seen a copy of Clyde Fans Part Two (and have spent more than a little bit of time searching for it), and thought that it had been supplanted by Clyde Fans Book One. Online, however, I have found references to Clyde Fans Part Two being published in 2003. Can you verify that Part Two (collecting issues 13 through 15) was indeed published?

Thank you.

Brother K

I wrote on a Saturday evening. Monday morning at 9 o'clock I got this from faraway:

*** **** ********<***@drawnandquarterly.com>

Mon 6/21/2021 9:21 AM

To: info

Cc: You

Hi Brother,

Thanks for your interest. Clyde Fans Part Two was never released as a book. The rest of Clyde Fans was serialized in the book version of Palookaville (e.g. PV20) and the entire story was collected in the complete Clyde Fans.

I hope this helps!

Best,

***

In case you were wondering, THAT is so fuckin' customer service. And quite an anomaly in my dealings with publishers over the years, who have usually just ignored me...even when I was writing to help them or to request information about something I had ordered. But this is my second time writing to Drawn & Quarterly, and I had quick responses from them both times. (And btw, they also produce superb books, and you can buy anything with their name on it and be assured of a quality publication.)

ANYway, after that exchange I went back to the Wikipedia page and corrected several errors. Here are my edits...which as of this writing still stand:

The second of these is the caption that appeared underneath a picture of Clyde Fans Book One. Originally it had the dates as 1997 - 2017 and the page count as 488...both of which were references to the one volume complete Clyde Fans which was published in 2019. I thought it would have been more appropriate to leave that information intact, insert a picture of Clyde Fans and excise the ": Book One" from the caption, but I don't like fucking around with copyrighted images,  so I just adjusted the text.

No, no, thank YOU.