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...
"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:
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| 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.
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:
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| 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:
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| 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--
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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:
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:
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| 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--
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| 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.
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--
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| Public Domain |
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?)
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.
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