The light hit the Rock so I got the greenish tint

A lot of surfers were out in the cold water (and rain)

Saw Jim Wallis on MORNING JOE talking about Evangelicals for Trump in his CHRIST IN CRISIS

I thought I was the only one old enough to remember when Evangelicals were Christian. Not so.
Wallis explains that the Evangelicals (White Evangelicals) for Trump are really Whites first, haters of multi-culturalism, and not Evangelicals at all in the sense of followers of Jesus. Best I can see, it started or gained power with the Civil Rights Act, back in 1964, and then Nixon's Southern Strategy. All we need is for a dozen Evangelical ministers to bring Christianity back to Evangelicalism. It would crack Trump support wide open. Even the Republican Vice President and Republican Senators might give Jesus a chance.

Accomplished free solo climber Brad Gobright dies in climbing accident As the pair were making their decent at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, Gobright and another climber fell from their route down the side of the cliff, state police told NBC News.

I will never understand people who are fearless. 

My Private Beach

Orphan of the storm

one mile north

fROM ONE MILE NORTH

WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR DOCTOR IS AN ALCOHOLIC--1891

OUT OF DENIAL, I PREDICT THE DEMOCRATIC TICKET: BLOOMBERG AND BUTTIGIEG

You can wait and see.

BEACH UNDER WATER YESTERDAY; RESORT TO THE TREES

Cheerful at 84, finally, Craig Moore the photographer on his own camera

84 Years Old Today--adding another possibly more cheerful picture

The Miracle Repeated--Skillet Bread Again--4 Photographs

Unbelievable. One big bowl, if you don't insist on starting the yeast and water in another bowl. Almost no cleanup. So you take snippers to the wall and harvest rosemary when you pick up the paper which you are still for a few weeks subscribing to. So every half hour for 2 hours you have to do something, like take the bread out of the oven. So it does not take all day. You are not packaging rolls at 4 pm. Well, there is not much left at 10 am, but that is another matter.

Astounded at how easy and good the Skillet Bread is

What if I had not put a little sugar in the yeast despite the recipe? Would it have been better?
Now, having used the cheapest ingredients, I am ready to try Rye Skillet Bread.
How did I never hear of Skillet Bread? Saw it on Facebook last week. Just stunned. I could not eat all the fruit I had prepared. You have to leave room for another slice or two of skillet bread.

2 Photos Skillet Bread to start with and 10 minutes later

Waiting for us

Scofflaws / Beach Terrorists in the No-Dogs Beach

How long a scarred old dolphin can feed a couple of dozen buzzards and a few gulls

Christoph Irmscher reviews HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS in The New Criterion

We expected nothing and got a big review in the London Times Literary Supplement then a big review in the New York Review of Books. Now a sweet two full page review in The New Criterion. Here is the start of the first paragraph:
What an extraordinary two-hundredth birthday present for Herman Melville: a handsome Library of America edition collecting all of his poems in one volume, and in reliable textual form, too. Two crisply drawn maps, a chronology, over fifty pages of detailed notes provided by his best biographer, and a midnight-blue ribbon marker: Melville would have been surprised by all the attention. . . .

What splendid company. Mike Abrams, Lionel, Harry, Hershel, Leon, and Alfred

M.H. Abrams, 2009.(Dale R. Corson)

M.H. Abrams, the distinguished literary critic, died April 22, at age 102. This appraisal of the man and his work by Tablet’s Adam Kirsch originally appeared on July 11, 2012, on the occasion of M.H. Abrams’ 100th birthday. 

***

When Henry James paid a visit to his native country in 1905, after decades living in Europe, he was struck with a kind of pious horror by the spectacle he found on the Lower East Side of New York City. As a novelist, James was bothered most of all by his fear of what these “swarming” Jews would mean for the future of the English language in America. Visiting Yiddish cafés, he saw them “as torture-rooms of the living idiom; the piteous gasp of which at the portent of lacerations to come could reach me in any drop of the surrounding Accent of the Future.” To James, the English language and English literature were the inalienable possession of the Anglo-Saxon race—a common feeling that persisted long after James wrote. As late as the 1930s, while Jews made up more than their share of Ivy League students—and would have been even more overrepresented if not for quotas—they were still virtually absent from the English faculty.

Then, almost overnight, everything changed. Starting in the postwar years, anti-Semitism became intellectually unrespectable, thanks to its association with Nazism and the Holocaust, while the flood of new students entering the universities under the G.I. Bill meant that there was an urgent need for new faculty. Jewish professors, critics, and scholars were newly acceptable—Lionel Trilling studied Arnold at Columbia, and Harry Levin studied Joyce at Harvard. Leon Edel wrote the biography of Henry James, and Hershel Parker wrote the biography of Melville. Alfred Kazin recovered the history of the American novel in On Native Grounds, a title whose defiant claim could not be missed.

Sandberg on my Melville: The Making of the Poet--Happy to come across it!

Melville: The Making of the Poet by Hershel Parker

Published March 4, 2008 | By Robert Sandberg

Anyone wanting to know Herman Melville the poet and how much poetry meant to him all of his life would do well to start with Hershel Parker’s Melville: The Making of the Poet. This book will surely prove foundational in the coming years and decades as Melville enthusiasts and scholars come to enjoy easy access to Melville’s poetry — many for the first time — as it becomes readily available in the forthcoming final two volumes of the Northwestern-Newberry series, The Writings of Herman Melville. Parker intentionally does not excerpt or quote much of Melville’s poetry, nor does he offer extended discussions concerning Melville’s status as a poet. However he does suggest that Melville’s poetry might be favorably ranked with the poetry of Dickinson, Whitman, the Brownings, and Tennyson. Parker is not alone in suggesting and arguing for the worth of Melville’s poetry. Many poets, readers, and critics have praised Melville’s poetic writings — Robert Penn Warren, Muriel Rukeyser (The Life of Poetry), and, more recently, Helen Vendler (Poems, Poets, Poetry: An Introduction and Anthology), to name just a few.

What Parker does do in Melville: The Making of the Poet is cite, document, and discuss thoroughly the evidence related to Melville’s reading and study of poetry from his earliest years that renders obsolete and unsustainable the unfounded, inaccurate view that poetry for Melville was a sideline, an afterthought, a way to escape the disappointing contemporary reception and poor sales of prose masterworks like Moby-Dick. In following Melville’s reading and book buying, Parker shows us glimpses of him finding, reading, and purchasing works (e.g., purchasing on October 27, 1861 Henry Taylor’s Notes from Life in Seven Essays that encouraged him to assume the identity of a poet and pursue the sort of life best suited to the writing of poetry.

Finally, perhaps not the least of the facts you will learn when reading Melville: The Making of the Poet, are those related to Parker’s re-telling and re-documenting (the evidence has been lying in plain site for decades) Melville’s failed, but very real, attempt to publish in 1860 what would have been his first published volume of poetry, titled simply, by Melville himself, Poems.

If you want to understand and appreciate Melville the poet and the poetry he wrote, this is an essential, foundational book to add to your reading library.

East Wind Sandblasting--Countered by Sand Goggles

John Bel Edwards and Andy Beshear--Cousins of mine

Not close cousins, but kin. And both Democrats who won despite Trump's having worked for their Republican opponents. And while one is more appealing to me than the other, remember that his opponent was much worse. I am pleased that Edwards is kin through the Sims family which DNA sends us to Poundsford, near Bristol. 

Vendler in the 5 December 2019 NYRofB and /r/literature on Melville's Poetry--Warren, Parker, Bloom, Vendler

After reading Helen Vendler's review of the Library of America HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS in the 5 December 2019 NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS I have been looking around at the slow recognition of Melville's poetry. As late as 1997 Alfred Kazin could say, "You have to remember that poetry was just a sideline with Melville; it was never important to him and he was never good at it." This was at a Barnes & Noble session with Paul Metcalf and me. I corrected Kazin mildly by pointing out that whatever he thought of the poetry, it was what Melville wrote for a third of a century. In 2002 I was stunned that, ignoring all the documentation, three reviewers of the second volume of my biography of Melville, Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Foster, all expressed doubt that Melville had tried to publish POEMS in 1860 and even suggested that I had made the volume up--this despite his notes to his brother Allan on how he wanted the book published. The contemptuous ignorance of these reviews has had a strange afterlife. As recently as 2019, in the June issue of LEVIATHAN, John Bryant recalls these reviews (not naming the culprits), saying this: "one reviewer stated that Parker 'surmises' the existence of the volume--a fair-enough verb given the indirect though conclusive evidence at hand." Of course I was not surmising, not with the existence of the 12-point "Memoranda for Allan concerning the publication of my verses." "Fair enough?" What a strange thing to say about a willful blindness to evidence. There is high-minded skepticism but there is also willful distortion of evidence. My MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET (2008) was an outgrowth of my conviction of the importance of Melville's poetry, and the importance of recognizing that he started training himself as a poet as early as 1857 or certainly by 1858.   In a review of the 2008 book, Robert Faggen said, "Parker doesn't attempt here to answer Kazin's second point in any detail, though he makes it very clear that he regards Melville as a great poet, as have Helen Vendler, Lawrence Buell, William Spengemann and Robert Penn Warren. But perhaps no one has led the scholarly charge on this question with as much force as Parker. By setting once and for all the biographical and cultural context of Melville's efforts, Parker hopes that there can be a more focused, informed appreciation of Melville's accomplishment as a poet. And what a great and often thrilling achievement it is."

How strange to have the journal LEVIATHAN celebrating Melville's second volume of poems, BATTLE-PIECES, as his "inaugural" volume of poetry! How strange to have John Bryant in 2019 calling 2002 reviewer's contempt for my "surmises" about the existence of POEMS a "fair-enough verb"! You see why it is so very important that Dennis Zhou in the 25 October 2019 TLS and Helen Vendler in the 5 December 2019 NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, both reviewing the Library of America volume HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS, have cut through all such nonsense to treat POEMS as real, though what survives of it is debatable, and to treat BATTLE-PIECES as his first volume of poems to be published, but not the first one he prepared for publication, and to treat CLAREL as a great poem.

This is from /r/literature, apparently around 2016:

Herman Melville's often popular for his prose writing, and he has earned his place as one of the great masters of American prose alongside luminaries such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saul Bellow, William Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Vladimir Nabokov, and Don DeLillo.

What's often forgotten, even among staunch Melville fans, is his body of poetry. He's written the epic poem Clarel, which, whatever flaws it may have, has its defenders and admirers, three of them being Southern author Robert Penn Warren, Melville biographer and scholar Hershel Parker and Melville admirer Harold Bloom. He, being one of the first proto-modernist poets, also wrote many Civil War poems, many of which compete with the best poems of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and Melville's poetry has its admirers, including Helen Vendler, who said of Clarel:

What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame.'"

So, while it is true that Melville's eminence lies primarily in his prose writing (and he is a prose-poet of the highest order, mixing poetry and prose in a way that has yet to be unrivaled), his poetry is still worthy of recognition.

Has anyone here on /r/literature read Melville's epic poem Clarel (or at least part of it) and/or any of his other poems?

So my Beshear Cousin is now going to be the Governor of Kentucky

The obnoxious Bevin could have made this even uglier. Whew!

1918--wonderful letter home from soldier in France--a Shoun cousin (Schlemp descendant)

The Johnson City, Tennessee STAFF 3 January 1919

Deep [1976] background for Vendler's new review in THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS. 5 December 2019

PITTSFIELD 29 May 1976 (having flown East from Los Angeles) to deliver my talk on the character of Vine in Melville's CLAREL.

. . . had a real triumph--controversy but did a real show--Helen Vendler: “I’d never seen you perform--your students must love you”--real triumph.” Then to NYC wi Yannella . . . .

Today, 14 November 2019, wrote this to the Library of America editor.---

Thank you, John. Helen Vendler read CLAREL in 1976 before coming with a friend to the Melville centenary meeting at Pittsfield. I gave the big talk, a version of the Hawthorne-Vine story I worked on for decades, last in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. It different from Bezanson in focusing on Vine's race long since being run, Hawthorne's great achievements being in the past when HM met him, however impressive he still was. One man in the audience came close to dying in his rage at what I had said. The reddish haired man was in a paroxysm--truly in danger of dying right there, sputtering and shouting invectives at me for daring to minimize Hawthorne even by literary proxy. Later Helen's friend told me that Helen had listened to the fury while saying (of me) over and over, "He's right, he's right." So that was her first experience with CLAREL. I have not read the review yet, but will do so now. You were right in your hint about the quality of the reviewer assigned. I probably mentioned her to you as the one I hoped for. No one else would have been as well qualified.

Well, how about that!

Hershel

THERE'S NO POINT KEEPING A DIARY IF YOU NEVER CONSULT IT WHEN GOOD THINGS HAPPEN TODAY.

There's a big review by Helen Vendler in the NYRofB about the Library of America HERMAN MELVILLE: COMPLETE POEMS

Helen read CLAREL in 1976 in preparation for my big talk at the centenary meeting in Pittsfield. Let me see if I can copy some I wrote just now to the Library of America editor.

Thank you, John. Helen Vendler read CLAREL in 1976 before coming with a friend to the Melville centenary meeting at Pittsfield. I gave the big talk, a version of the Hawthorne-Vine story I worked on for decades, last in MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. It different from Bezanson in focusing on Vine's race long since being run, Hawthorne's great achievements being in the past when HM met him, however impressive he still was. One man in the audience came close to dying in his rage at what I had said. The reddish haired man was in a paroxysm--truly in danger of dying right there, sputtering and shouting invectives at me for daring to minimize Hawthorne even by literary proxy. Later Helen's friend told me that Helen had listened to the fury while saying (of me) over and over, "He's right, he's right." So that was her first experience with CLAREL. I have not read the review yet, but will do so now. You were right in your hint about the quality of the reviewer assigned. I probably mentioned her to you as the one I hoped for. No one else would have been as well qualified.

Well, how about that!

Hershel

Attachments area

2 men wanting war to continue--to make England submit, to make DuPont money. A lesson for today?

By Karina Urbach

June 9, 2015

Even more evidence of Windsor’s treachery was hidden in Spanish archives. Like his relative Coburg, the Duke of Windsor was anti-Semitic. In June 1940 Don Javier Bermejillo, a Spanish diplomat and old friend of Windsor—he had known him since the 1920s—reported a conversation he had had with the Duke to his superiors.

Bermejillo reported that the Duke of Windsor blamed “the Jews, the Reds, and the Foreign Office for the war”. Windsor added that he would like to put Anthony Eden and other British politicians “up against a wall.” Bermejillo stated that Windsor had already made similar remarks about the Reds and the Jews to him long before he became King in 1936. In another conversation on June 25, 1940, Bermejillo reported that Windsor stressed if one bombed England effectively this could bring peace. Bermejillo concluded that the Duke of Windsor seemed very much to hope that this would occur: “He wants peace at any price.” This report went to Franco and was then passed on to the Germans. The bombing of Britain started on July 10.

 and here is an American 2 weeks after we entered World War I hoping that the European war will last long enough for American capitalists (meaning his employer, DuPont) to corner the market on dyestuffs:

A Dabbs cousin.

Chris Russell, Craftsman, Making us Waterproof on the Southwest Side

"The Trees" by Morro Bay High School--without Litter, for once

A Model Apology for every U. S. Representative who will Perjure Himself Today

In 1959 I wrote a really good paper for Phillip Harth on Swift's Campaign against Marlborough

I have not looked at it in years, but I remember that at the ending I quote Sarah Churchill and comment that what she said had just the right sting in the tail. I enjoyed her tremendously in 1959, and only in the 21st century have learned that we both descend from Sir Thomas Leigh, the mayor who was in charge of Elizabeth's coronation, me a lot more steps down. He is my 13th Great Grandfather, which puts him in a class of a few hundred over 16,000 men. You can think of him as one in 16,000 plus, but I think much more familiarly about him. After all, that's a nice portrait of him we can look at. Now, I have been doing floor exercises for months now to documentaries about World War 2. Much of that time I was still in denial and not looking at any modern news at all. I was waiting for impeachable offences to be acknowledged as such. And my admiration for Winston Churchill has risen. Forget Gallipoli. He inspired the British when they needed inspiration. So I checked Geni and it says that through my mother's Scots ancestors I am his 10th cousin once removed. But what about Sir Thomas Leigh? Churchill is his 11th Great Grandson and I am his 13th Great Grandson. How many cousins does that make us in addition to the 10? Now, all this is fun, but in the last weeks in the daytime I have been looking up family blockaders (meaning moonshine runners) and have dozens of stories, hundreds, really, of 6th and 7th cousins in North Carolina and adjacent states. Some of them were notable fellows, and all of them ornery to the core. My folks. And in case you wondered, yes, double l Phillip. What a great teacher he was.

So Harold Bloom died one day before the Library of America published his THE AMERICAN CANON

So what? you say?? No, no, it does not matter how many books Bloom had written and how many more he had edited, he wanted to be around when THE AMERICAN CANON was published. If he had been born in November instead of July, he would have been looking forward to being 90. Great people are alive until they are dead, if they are good and lucky.
Anyhow, hurray for the new book.

The elite crew at work outside the new windows

Morning's Baking--Egg Bread--2 pictures

With raisins and some sesame seeds and painted before baking with buttermilk (milk and apple vinegar), The one from the gas oven was phenomenally light, the other from the electric a little heavier.  It was hard work, but worth it all. Even Luke the Window-Fitter thinks so.

Just when you think Trump has made you unshockable--1908 K K K Flour for Happy White Babies

The Atlanta Constitution 18 August 1908,

Rock from a mile north, Sunday morning. Number of complaints from people on the beach? Zero.

The barber did a 10 minute job with Hack-at-her or Hatteker, a cheap machine that paid for itself today

When your barber is aging almost half as fast as you, you need to spend big on labor-saving devices. Why don't we do that more often?

Missing from the journal LEVIATHAN: The joy of research and discovery and understanding literature

This is provoked by Samuel Otter's "Discerning The Confidence-Man." I have already reposted a 2011 piece in which I reproduced one of the many images of The Shade of Napoleon Brooding Over his Tomb (no one knows which Melville saw). Otter beautifully reproduces 2 of the images, one full-page. But what I miss and have missed in LEVIATHAN all along, under John Bryant's editorship and then Otter's, is a sense of the joy of research and discovery and the exultation of understanding literature. This passage below embodies what I have lived my academic life for. It is from the end of the preface to MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE.




THE TOPIC IS “LITERARY DETECTIVES”:

They will try their equivalent of “froward” and “godless” on Google every few weeks for most of a decade, as Scott Norsworthy did until he discovered a source for some of Melville’s once-baffling notes in the back of his Shakespeare. They will boggle at a passage in a Melville text and find riches, as I did when I Googled “Napoleon” and “outline” and “tree” and discovered that Melville in The Confidence-Man was referring to a then-famous example of hidden art. There will always be a few frequenters of known archives, a few imaginative trackers of missing archives, a few librarians who recognize gaps in their institution’s papers and reach out their hands for lost treasures, and a few “divine amateurs” who believe that the facts matter and that they can identify some of them from their computers or in raids on distant libraries. And for literary biography, there will always be readers who want to know about the living man or woman whose deepest being infuses the books they love.

What I said on Facebook about my 2011 post on THE SHADE OF NAPOLEON--Where is the joy of the hunt and of discovery?

The latest issue of LEVIATHAN has 2 great pictures in this group--but where is the sense of discovery, the joyous excitement of realizing there is something alluded to that no one besides you had suspected? Why write a "scholarly article" (which may not be quite scholarly) if you don't do so out of excitement and joy?

The Shade of Napoleon Brooding over his Tomb--Hidden Art--a 30 March 2011 post here

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The Shade of Napoleon Brooding over his Tomb--Hidden Art

This is one of the variant images Melville had in mind in the last chapter of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN. When I was working on the 2006 Norton Critical Edition I hit the passage on "the figure of Napoleon outlined by the tree" and decided, Duh!, that he was referring to something his audience would recognize. I Googled

Napoleon outline tree

and immediately got one image of an 1830 engraving--an example of hidden art, where you either can't see the standing figure of Napoleon or else can't stop seeing the standing figure of Napoleon. Now, the next day I tried to locate the Internet site again and found it only after many attempts and with different key words. Go figure, not to pun too humorously.

One moral here: if we even slightly sense that there is something covert going on in a 19th text, something that looks a trifle like a topical allusion---go to Google! I got triangular duel that way, for the 2006 NCE.

2005 or so--Notes about "the figure of Napoleon" on 214 in the 1971 THE CONFIDENCE-MAN, Norton Critical Edition

I was reading the book trying to be alert for passages that Elizabeth Foster and later editors such as me had not footnoted. Here is the page when I recognized that something was going on. Since this was just questioning, not discovery, I did not date my notes. I will have to check my diary for the joy of discovery. More commentary below!

You see I was asking (question mark!): "a famous instance of apperception testing?" Often you can sort of nearly almost get what is going on--at least, get that something is going on. And oh the joy of discovery! How I miss that in the Melville publication LEVIATHAN. Maybe that will change under the new editorship. You know where I see that joy now?--in Scott Norsworthy's blog.

The Shade of Napoleon Brooding over his Tomb--Hidden Art--a 30 March 2011 post here

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The Shade of Napoleon Brooding over his Tomb--Hidden Art

This is one of the variant images Melville had in mind in the last chapter of THE CONFIDENCE-MAN. When I was working on the 2006 Norton Critical Edition I hit the passage on "the figure of Napoleon outlined by the tree" and decided, Duh!, that he was referring to something his audience would recognize. I Googled

Napoleon outline tree

and immediately got one image of an 1830 engraving--an example of hidden art, where you either can't see the standing figure of Napoleon or else can't stop seeing the standing figure of Napoleon. Now, the next day I tried to locate the Internet site again and found it only after many attempts and with different key words. Go figure, not to pun too humorously.

One moral here: if we even slightly sense that there is something covert going on in a 19th text, something that looks a trifle like a topical allusion---go to Google! I got triangular duel that way, for the 2006 NCE.