The title passage for Little Altars

I was surprised by how much I loved The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood when I read it several years ago. I'm finally getting around to reading the prequel, Little Altars Everywhere. The humid Louisiana setting and-I don't know what to call it-Gothic optimism make it a perfect early summer book. I noticed on Goodreads today I am reading two different books with pink covers. Jeez, my reading list is turning into some southern belle's wedding shower.

Here is the sequence from the book that gives it its title, taken from a dream Siddha had about an outcast girl she picked on at girl scout camp to fit in:

We are swinging high, flying way up, higher than in real life. And when I look down, I see all the ordinary stuff-our brick house, the porch, the toolshed, the back windows, the oil-drum barbecue pit, the clothesline, the chinaberry tree. But they are all lit up from inside so their everyday selves have holy sparks in them, and if people could only see those sparks, they'd go and kneel in front of them and pray and just feel good. Somehow the whole world looks like little altars everywhere. And every time Edythe and me fly up into the air and then dive down to earth, it's like we're bowing our heads at those altars and we are praying and playing all at the same time.

What I've looked up thus far for The Gods Will Have Blood

Gamelin mentions to his girlfriend Elodie that her slicing bread reminds him of a German novel where Werther admires a girl named Charlotte doing the same action. Elodie asks if they get married and Gamelin, ever charmless, says no, he died a violent death.

The novel he is referring to is The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe published in 1774 which is basically about a love triangle that Werther decides to resolve by shooting himself in the head. Unfortunately he fucks it up and doesn't die for 12 more hours.

I knew who Danton was, a moderate figure in the French Revolution who ran afoul of Robespierre in the end, but not when he was killed. April, 1794 which was tragically only a few months before Robespierre himself met the same end.

The book keeps referring to ci-devant aristocrats. This was a derogatory term used during the Revolution for aristocrats who had not mended their ways. Prior to the Revolution, it was also derogatory but meant an aristocrat who was broke, like someone out of a Fitzgerald novel.

I was curious what became of the Tuileries, briefly the home of the Royal Family after they fled Versailles and later turned into a government center during the Revolution. Then it was Napoleon's palace. It was burned down in 1871 during the Paris Commune uprising. Parts of the Louvre were also burned. They were restored but in the end the French government decided the palace was a symbol of the old monarchical ways and it was torn down in 1882. The Tuileries Gardens are what remain.

Here is what it used to look like:

Brotteaux mentions that he also works as an amanuensis. This basically means someone who works as a secretary or more accurately, one who takes dictation. You can see the Latin word "manu" within it.

After all the descriptions of the sans culotte uniform with the striped trousers, I wanted some kind of visual because I keep picturing clown pants. Voila:

Which still looks a little Big Top-ish to me.

There are so many debates on religion in the book and the most sympathetic character is the atheist and former aristocrat Brotteaux (although Father Longuemare is a modest, likable counterpoint), I was curious if Anatole France was himself an atheist.  Yep. He once wrote a satirical novel called Penguin Island about what happens when a blind missionary baptizes a flock of penguins, mistaking them for humans. And the ultimate proof he's in the club: Hitch included him in his Portable Atheist.

Unrelated to research, I was reading this the other night and Music Choice played Tracy Chapman's "Talkin Bout a Revolution" which went from vaguely inspirational to specifically creepy hella quick. You better free your mind instead, Tracy.

Epistemophilia: Emma Goldman, no Ragtime

I listened to a podcast of the Leonard Lopate show today about the history of labor movements in the US and inevitably Emma Goldman's name came up. The author Philip Dray (There is Power in a Union) said that while Goldman was a union supporter, she was too hot for most of them to handle after McKinley's assassination in 1901. Dray says the killer, Leon Czolgosz, claimed to have been encouraged and influenced by Goldman. I knew Goldman lost favor with the anarchist movement by speaking out in favor of Czolgosz but I'm not really clear what the extent of her beforehand relationship was. Evidently, he had met her briefly and was a big fan of her speeches but they don't seem to have been particularly close. The way Dray phrased it, I couldn't tell if he meant that Goldman suggested Czolgosz kill McKinley but if that's the case, no one knows.

Dray also mentioned that Goldman was deported in 1919. Wait, does that mean she wasn't American? Actually, it looks like she was born in Russia and moved here when she was around 16. Granted, most of my knowledge of Emma Goldman comes from the movie Reds in which I don't remember Maureen Stapleton having a Russian accent. And probably the main reason I grew up liking Emma Goldman was first because I loved the movie and second because I loved Maureen Stapleton, partially because I figured she was related to the lady who played Edith on All in the Family (is that even true? Ah, Wikipedia says she is no relation to Jean Stapleton.) Oh well. Still a great movie. I can't believe my parents took me to see that when it came out. I was 12 I think. At the time, Jack Nicholson naked and Warren Beatty peeing red made a bigger impression on me than the politics but I surprisingly still found the movie engrossing even though it was long enough to have an intermission.

Epistemophilia: useful idiots

I really like the PRI show The Changing World, but it can be a bit up and down. Their recent two parter on  polyezniy-or useful-idiots was however one of their best. The term was coined possibly by Lenin but in practice really refined by Stalin to describe Westerners who were either blinded by the idealistic falderal of Soviet idiology or just susceptible to flattery (or both) and were thus unable to see the misery of Russians under the Soviet rule. Or just didn't care. Stalin was said to have been capable of being quite charming when he wanted, as befits a psychopath.

Some of the people name-checked: Doris Lessing, George Bernard Shaw (who apparently admired Stalin's Pygmalion-esque manhandled transformation of Russia) and American singer Paul Robeson. They played a clip of Lessing herself being interviewed about it and it was rather mortifying. The story of Robeson was particularly sad because he was lured by the Soviet propaganda about the lack of racism in the Soviet Union (interesting to think of this in terms of the rising number of racial incidents against Africans in Moscow now.) He would travel to the Soviet Union to see old friends who were largely in prison by then and were pulled out and cleaned up for his visit so he could see they were fine. They were promptly shipped back to their labor camps afterwards. Robeson even recorded the Soviet anthem in English. I see a clip on YouTube of him singing the Chinese anthem as well.  Mao and Stalin? Could you pick two worse leaders in the 20th century? Dude, I hope you figured this out before you died in 1976.

The most interesting story though was about an NYT reporter named Walter Duranty who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Russia in 1931 where he reported that NO ONE died directly as a result of the famine caused by Stalin's first Five Year Plan (they estimate 10 million people died in Ukraine.) The Pulitzer, interestingly, is still on display at the Times-along with a placard saying many people disagreed with his receiving it, including Times' staff.

Here's more interesting trivia about Duranty: in his former life he collaborated with Aleister Crowley on some poetry and in some vague sort of debauchery.

There has been some rumbling lately that Russia is once again becoming a country we should be wary of, thanks in part to Putin. The PRI documentary also mentioned he is trying to whitewash Stalin's image in the history books of Russian students. This might explain why on an NPR story about the Volga River, some people expressed dismay the name was changed back to Volgograd from Stalingrad.

The Battle of Stalingrad in 1942, btw, is possibly the bloodiest battle in history.

Part II of the documentary looks at some more recent useful idiots, like those who supported the Hussein regime in Iraq.